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Caroline MacGregor: You're listening to 89.1 WEMU. I'm Caroline MacGregor. And today, we are talking about Torc. They are a pioneer in self-driving vehicle technology, and this company recently announced the expansion of its autonomous truck testing operations to public roads in Michigan. The company says it's using the latest generation Daimler truck autonomous chassis based on the industry leading freight liner Cascadia. With me today to talk about this expansion is Dave Anderson. He's the Vice President of Engineering for Torc, and he's also a native of Michigan. Welcome, Dave! Thanks so much for joining me today!
Dave Anderson: Well, thank you, Caroline! And thank you for having me here to talk today!
Caroline MacGregor: So, first of all, I just want to ask you. In August, the company announced its expansion into Ann Arbor Township, saying it would serve as the primary engineering base for autonomous trucks. Tell me about this recent announcement that these autonomous trucks are coming to public roads in Michigan.
Dave Anderson: Absolutely! Yeah, I mean, the announcement is really kind of multifaceted. One, to kind of build on the story from August on coming to Ann Arbor and the Ann Arbor area with our engineering team, really was a focus on talent and talent expansion, kind of building on what we have from sort of the rich history from an automotive perspective here in Southeast Michigan, in addition to the talent can come from local and state universities. All of which, again, build into that automotive legacy from a technology perspective. And so, we thought that that was a really great point to make Ann Arbor home for our engineering team. As we took that plan forward, really kind of bringing our truck and our truck testing to public roads in Michigan was really sort of the next step of commercial expansion, really leveraging on, the idea of, again, that freight liner Cascadia chassis that you'd mentioned earlier, and our partnership with Daimler Truck is, again, sort of the next step in our technology path to building both hardware and software that is more robust for a broader set of scenarios, environmental climbs, changes in seasons, all of which give us better data, better testing to validate and expand really sort of our performance case from a safety and validation verification standpoint on road. So, we are doing on-road testing with the self-driving trucks here in the greater Ann Arbor area, of course, all with safety drivers and drivers in cockpit of the truck.
Caroline MacGregor: Okay, I see. So, you will continue to use human beings until you know that the technology is completely safe. And then, these trucks would run with no human beings. Is that right?
Dave Anderson: That's ultimately the end commercialized goal, but the entire development process still includes human beings within the vehicle itself.
Caroline MacGregor: Okay, okay. Because I know a lot of people automatically get this knee-jerk reaction to the idea of trucks self-driving and, gosh, technology's great and all that. But what if there was an incident where a human being needed to step in quickly? But I know that a lot goes on behind the scenes in the actual monitoring of these trucks. Is that correct also from your facility?
Dave Anderson: That's absolutely correct! And the other comment I should make, I mean, everything from a safety standpoint is at the forefront of all that we do. The idea of being able to engineer it safe as a product really is part of the safety culture at Torc. It's ingrained into every process, every step, every execution path when we ever bring sort of a new level of functionality into the truck itself.
Caroline MacGregor: How many trucks are currently operating on Michigan roads--that you are operating on Michigan roads?
Dave Anderson: That's a great question. We don't publicly disclose the number of trucks that we have on road today. We'd be glad to ask if it's something that we could give you an order of magnitude towards. I will comment that the use of on public roads in Michigan is an expansion of the other on-road testing that we're also doing today. We do testing on-road in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas. We also do testing in and around our Blacksburg, Virginia corporate office. So, Michigan represents sort of the next step of expansion of testing and on-road development that we're doing as an organization.
Caroline MacGregor: I'm continuing my conversation with Dave Anderson. He's the Vice President of Engineering for Torc Robotics, which develops self-driving software for long-haul freight trucks throughout the U.S. When I spoke to one of your officials last August, it was stated that the company hopes to have a large fleet of trucks operating by 2027 and that you've been looking for workers skilled in automotive production and software, including AI and machine learning. How is this going now as far as your employees? You started, I believe, with 150 people or were operating with 150 in Ann Arbor. How many do you have today?
Dave Anderson: In Ann Arbor today, we have almost 200, so there's been continued growth. So, it's really exciting to once see, again, the growth in the team, the recruitment of that talent, and really helping it build some of those future applications.
Caroline MacGregor: I find it fascinating that these trucks have a, what you call, a supercomputer in the back that takes in all the cameras, the radar. Are they called LIDARs? Is that what it's called?
Dave Anderson: Yes, it is.
Caroline MacGregor: And then, they apparently merge and fuse all that sensor input together. I mean, this is just such state-of-the-art, futuristic technology. It's quite amazing! As far people who still are a bit reserved about the idea of autonomous trucks, what would you say to allay their concerns?
Dave Anderson: One of the things, again, I would go back to the comment I made about sort of the safety culture at Torc, safety is at the forefront of every engineer, every employee within Torc, who is building technology for our self-driving truck. That should give confidence in terms of the overall effort. The second part that I would share with you on that is that everything that we're doing is based around a data-driven initiative to ensure that the performance of what we're doing from a software standpoint meets the validation and verification criteria that supports our overall safety case, meaning that the safety performance indicators that we test and we monitor from an industry perspective to ensure safe operation of the truck are being met. So, it's the combined effort of the safety culture from an engineering practice standpoint. It's combined with the data that we use to derive our confidence in the actual performance of the vehicle. And then, it's the comparison to the safety performance indicators that ultimately give us confidence in terms of the operation of the truck itself.
Caroline MacGregor: How do new environments and seasonal conditions affect the hardware and the software performance of these trucks? Because they do operate differently and, obviously, you talked about Arizona, et cetera, very different conditions from up here in Michigan.
Dave Anderson: Yeah, that's a great question, and it's actually one of the other reasons to expand the on-road testing capability in Michigan. Michigan offers us some really nice, unique opportunities with the change in seasons, the change and weather conditions, whether it be sunshine, rain, snow, ice, for us to really test functionality. And more important, with that suite of sensors that you just mentioned, looking at cameras, LIDAR, radar, that gives us the ability to sense all those different conditions and build a data set that allows us to create scenarios that can help us train for more of those adverse conditions, which, again, is something that's a really unique attribute about working on-road here in Michigan.
Caroline MacGregor: And we see trucks on the road every day. It's just an enormous industry that the goods that move across the U.S. So, these trucks are going to be quite instrumental in the future of moving goods across the States.
Dave Anderson: I 100% agree with you! And I think that's actually one of the things that makes working on this such a pleasure because we can really see how much that that will help and that will impact and make the opportunity from a fulfillment standpoint for shippers, for carriers, for the overall logistics that just increases levels of efficiency that we've never seen before. So, it's a super-exciting time to be adding to the technology and adding to the business case for driving that.
Caroline MacGregor: Now, Torc has a partnership with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, the Michigan Department of Transportation and Ann Arbor SPARK. Tell me a little bit about this partnership, if you would, as far as how it affects what you are producing here in Michigan.
Dave Anderson: The idea of being connected to state and local efforts that can help us, like the MEDC, like what's going on with Michigan Department of Transportation, or even just Ann Arbor SPARK locally within the city of Ann Arbor, one, it gives the support for the overall effort of bringing trucks on road in Michigan. Second, it gives us access to different partner opportunities within the state of Michigan. And third, it gives us an access to talent when we start thinking about the continued growth of the team here in Ann Arbor. It's a scale that really is impressive, working on this as an application, getting up alongside of a truck that is 13 feet in height, eight and a half feet wide, and just the tractor itself is 28 feet long. And then, when you think about a 53-foot trailer behind it, it really does change the scale of a lot of what we've experienced individually. So, yeah, it's really, really exciting!
Caroline MacGregor: Well, thank you for joining us today! It's certainly been a fascinating subject to talk about, and we look forward to future updates.
Dave Anderson: Absolutely! Thank you for taking the time to talk, and I'd love to share more of the story as we continue to build and evolve.
Caroline MacGregor: You're listening to 89.1 WEMU-FM Ypsilanti.
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