Outrider, the pioneer in autonomous yard operations for logistics hubs, today announced it has expanded its integration of the NVIDIA DRIVE computing architecture within its yard automation solution.
Outrider is using the NVIDIA DRIVE hardware and software platform across its autonomous vehicle fleet that is currently operating in live production environments and at the Outrider Advanced Testing Facility.
"To make supply chains safer, more efficient, and sustainable, Outrider leverages leading automotive and self-driving technologies to accelerate the deployment of yard automation," said Jeremy Nett, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Outrider. "NVIDIA DRIVE provides a highly performant compute environment that helps our autonomous vehicles perceive and understand the world around them, enabling them to operate in complex distribution yards."
Critical links in the supply chain, distribution yards serve as the transition point for over 20 billion tons of freight moving worldwide annually. Yet, these yards are filled with repetitive, manual tasks. Outrider automates these tasks using both proprietary and off-the-shelf software and hardware technology. Outrider uses the NVIDIA DRIVE to collect and process data from numerous sensor inputs to gain complete 360-degree situational awareness for the self-driving yard trucks operating on Outrider's autonomy software.
"Outrider's innovative work in the autonomous vehicle space is redefining how distribution yards operate," said Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at NVIDIA. "The NVIDIA DRIVE platform delivers the perception compute and vision capabilities that help Outrider's autonomous yard trucks operate across various environments and conditions."
In addition to power-efficient, onboard machine-learning inference, Outrider is leveraging NVIDIA DRIVE software to develop state-of-the-art approaches for many of the perception functions necessary for automating distribution yards. Outrider takes advantage of NVIDIA's many libraries and building blocks to rapidly prototype and evaluate artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous solutions that can be quickly hardened and incorporated into the Outrider System.
"NVIDIA's software offerings have accelerated our ability to build capabilities quickly without starting from scratch," continued Nett. "Being part of NVIDIA's ecosystem has enabled us to tap skilled engineers already familiar with NVIDIA technologies rather than building home-grown, proprietary modules, allowing us to increase our engineering capacity quickly."
Outrider continues to be the only autonomous vehicle company solely focused on distribution yard automation. The company partners with many large, logistics-dependent enterprises that represent over 20 percent of all yard trucks operating in North America. The company has raised $118 million in funding to date and developed extensive intellectual property. Outrider operates the first-in-industry Advanced Testing Facility for autonomous yard operations, and maintains a broad partner ecosystem across technology suppliers and infrastructure partners. The company recently announced the completion of over 1000 autonomous moves in a live production environment with its customer Georgia-Pacific. Fast Company recently recognized Outrider as one of the "2022 World's Most Innovative Companies."