We believe that great technology should benefit everyone. Self-driving vehicles promise to save lives, make our days easier, and help us connect to the people and things we love. At Nuro, we’re pushing the boundaries of robotics to make those benefits available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Safety is our top priority. More than 1 million people die in car crashes around the world every year, and 94% are the result of human error. Self-driving vehicles could prevent many of those accidents and save thousands of lives. To do that, they need to be designed, built, and operated with safety in mind, and made broadly accessible.
That’s why we created the first fully self-driving, on-road vehicle designed to transport goods. We believe that self-driving delivery, and thus the resulting benefits, can be scaled sooner and more affordably, than self-driving passenger transportation. Our custom vehicle is engineered to make delivery of everything more accessible — from groceries to pet food, prescription drugs to dry cleaning.
With no driver or passengers to worry about, our vehicle can be built to keep what’s outside even safer than what’s inside. It’s lighter, nimbler, and slower than a passenger car, and is equipped with state-of-the-art software and sensing capabilities that never get distracted. With its smaller size and manufacturing costs, we can make vehicles more rapidly. And because it’s electric and fully self-driving, our vehicle can deliver life’s needs at an affordable price. Overall, this means spending less time on errands, and more time on life.
This Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment report outlines our approach to safety and the progress we have made so far. It is organized in two parts. Part 1 introduces Nuro, our vehicle, and our approach to safety. Part 2 explains how our vehicle fully addresses all 12 safety elements that the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has outlined as critical areas of focus for self-driving vehicles.
我们相信伟大的技术应该让每个人受益。自动驾驶汽车承诺拯救生命，让我们的日子更轻松，并帮助我们与我们所爱的人和事物联系。在Nuro，我们正在推动机器人技术的发展，以便随时随地为任何人提供这些优势。
安全是我们的首要任务。每年全球有超过100万人死于车祸，94％是人为错误的结果。自动驾驶车辆可以预防许多事故并挽救数千人的生命。要做到这一点，他们需要在设计，建造和操作时考虑到安全性，并且可以广泛使用。
这就是为什么我们创造了第一辆专为运输货物而设计的全自动驾驶型公路车辆。我们相信，与自动驾驶客运相比，自动驾驶交付以及由此带来的好处可以更快，更经济地扩展。我们的定制车辆旨在提供更便利的一切 - 从杂货到宠物食品，处方药到干洗。
没有司机或乘客担心，我们的车辆可以建造，以保持外面的东西比内部更安全。它比乘用车更轻，更灵活，更慢，并配备了最先进的软件和传感功能，永不分心。凭借其较小的尺寸和制造成本，我们可以更快地制造车辆。由于它是电动和完全自动驾驶，我们的车辆可以以实惠的价格满足生活需求。总的来说，这意味着花更少的时间在差事上，花更多的时间在生活上。
这份自愿安全自我评估报告概述了我们的安全方法以及我们迄今取得的进展。它分为两部分。第1部分介绍Nuro，我们的车辆，以及我们的安全方法。第2部分解释了我们的车辆如何完全满足交通部国家公路交通安全管理局已经列出的所有12个安全要素，作为自动驾驶车辆的关键重点领域。
Nuro was founded in 2016 by leaders in robotics and artificial intelligence with experience building some of the world’s first self-driving vehicles and some of the most innovative robotics systems. They saw the need for a new robotics company focused on making the technology available to everyone. The team has grown to include some of the very best minds from academia and industry. We are veterans of award-winning projects in robotics, consumer electronics, self-driving software, and automobiles.
Nuro成立于2016年，由机器人和人工智能领域的领导者组建，拥有构建世界上第一批自动驾驶车辆和一些最具创新性的机器人系统的经验。 他们认为需要一家新的机器人公司，专注于让每个人都能使用这项技术。 该团队已经成长为包括来自学术界和工业界的一些最优秀的人才。 我们是机器人，消费电子，自动驾驶软件和汽车等获奖项目的资深人士。
We envision a future where everything comes to you, on-demand, for free.
Today, we waste a lot of time running errands. Americans make a total of 220 billion vehicle trips a year. Of those, more than 20% are to shop or run errands.
To put that figure in perspective, commuting makes up about the same share of trips. That’s the equivalent of over 60 thousand lifetimes every year. Most of those trips use personal passenger cars, and expose drivers and passengers to the risk of an accident, generate pollution, and add to congestion.
What is required for people to stop spending time and making car trips to run errands? If everyone can get whatever they need as fast as (or faster than) going to the store themselves — and for a very low price — errands will become a thing of the past.
To make that a reality, we’ve set out to dramatically lower delivery costs through self-driving technology. We’ve built an entirely new type of self-driving vehicle designed purely for local goods transportation.
We are starting with groceries, working to make the convenience of grocery delivery accessible and affordable for customers everywhere. Customers can now place same-day delivery orders on the web or in a mobile app, and receive their orders at home from Nuro’s fleet of self-driving vehicles. Each order has the potential to replace one or more car trips — making our roads a little bit safer and less congested.
我们设想一个未来，随时随地为您提供免费服务。现如今，我们浪费了很多时间跑腿。美国人每年总共进行了2200亿次车辆旅行。其中，超过20％是购物或跑腿。为了正确看待这个数字，通勤构成了相同的旅行份额。这相当于每年超过6万的生命周期。这些旅行中的大多数都使用私人乘用车，并使驾驶员和乘客面临事故风险，产生污染并增加拥堵。人们需要什么才能停止花时间和开车去跑腿？如果每个人都可以获得他们需要的任何东西（或者更快）去商店自己 - 并且以非常低的价格 - 差事将成为过去。为了实现这一目标，我们已着手通过自动驾驶技术大幅降低运输成本。我们已经建造了一种全新的自动驾驶车辆，专为当地货物运输而设计。我们从杂货开始，致力于为各地的客户提供方便的杂货配送服务。客户现在可以在网络或移动应用程序中下达当日发货订单，并在家中从Nuro的自动驾驶车辆接收订单。每个订单都有可能取代一次或多次汽车旅行 - 使我们的道路更安全，更少拥挤。
Nuro has designed, prototyped, and extensively tested a custom, low-speed, zero-emission, self-driving vehicle. It is engineered for short neighborhood trips and for the exclusive purpose of transporting and delivering goods. With a flexible interior design, our vehicle can handle errands of all kinds — from dinner to dry cleaning.
Even though it’s a new type of vehicle, we designed it to be familiar to other road users — resembling many Neighborhood Electric Vehicles — so it can safely share the street. When you see our custom vehicle on the road, it will look like a narrow car, being driven by a safe, cautious driver.
Nuro’s vehicle is designed to be fully self-driving, so it does not have space for a driver or passengers. Designing the vehicle, software, and service ourselves allows us to maximize reliability and find ways to build safety in at every step that wouldn’t be possible if each piece was engineered in isolation. This novel approach has allowed us to introduce a range of new safety innovations with the potential to dramatically outperform the full-speed, passenger-laden, and heavier vehicles on the road today.
This is just the beginning for self-driving. This new technology holds great promise, but will also require extensive testing and refinement for self-driving vehicles to eventually be the safest on the road, provide a great experience for customers, and be seen as an asset to communities.
Nuro设计，制作并广泛测试了定制的低速零排放自动驾驶车辆。它专为短途旅行而设计，专门用于运输和运送货物。凭借灵活的内部设计，我们的车辆可以处理各种差事 - 从晚餐到干洗。
虽然它是一种新型车辆，但我们将其设计为其他道路使用者熟悉 - 类似于许多邻里电动车 - 因此它可以安全地共享街道。当你在路上看到我们的定制车辆时，它看起来就像一辆狭窄的车，由一个安全，谨慎的驾驶员驾驶。
Nuro的车辆设计为完全自动驾驶，因此没有驾驶员或乘客的空间。自行设计车辆，软件和服务使我们能够最大限度地提高可靠性，并找到在每个步骤中建立安全性的方法，如果每个部件都是单独设计的，那么这是不可能实现的。这种新颖的方法使我们能够引入一系列新的安全创新，有可能大大超越当今道路上的全速，载客和重型车辆。
这只是自驾车的开始。这项新技术具有很大的潜力，但也需要对自动驾驶车辆进行大量测试和改进，最终成为最安全的，为客户提供良好的体验，并被视为社区的资产。
At Nuro, our goal is to produce robots that are as neighborly as they are helpful. Because we provide last-mile delivery to homes and businesses, our vehicles will be routinely visible to the consumer and accountable directly to the communities in which they operate — we will only be successful if they are regarded as safe and beneficial. That’s why we designed our service to improve safety, expand economic opportunity, make home delivery affordable for everyone, and reduce pollution and congestion.
Safety
Core to Nuro’s mission, and business model, is the production of a vehicle that is designed to be uniquely safe, leveraging the particular benefits of providing goods delivery to create innovations not possible with passenger vehicles.
This philosophy permeates the company’s approach to engineering. Our vehicles are designed to be fully self-driving. Our technology continuously learns from every situation it sees, sharing that learning with every other vehicle we operate. It is programmed to always practice defensive driving, and unlike human drivers, it never gets distracted.
In the US, more than 3,000 people died from distracted driving-related crashes in 2016, and more than 37,000 people died from all kinds of accidents.By avoiding the human errors that cause 94% of all accidents, self-driving vehicles like Nuro’s have the potential to save thousands of lives every year in the US, and more than a million worldwide.
Our vehicle is engineered to be safer than nearly any other — it is lighter than a passenger vehicle, narrower and more nimble, and operates at lower speeds. This approach gives us more time to react, shortens our stopping distance, and provides an additional safety buffer to the side of the vehicle. Together, these advantages help prevent accidents that standard vehicles cannot avoid, such as someone jumping out from between parked cars or swerving across the road.
在Nuro，我们的目标是生产与他们有帮助的邻居机器人。因为我们为家庭和企业提供最后一英里的交付，我们的车辆将经常被消费者看到并直接对他们所在的社区负责 - 只有当他们被认为是安全和有益的时候我们才会成功。这就是为什么我们设计我们的服务来提高安全性，扩大经济机会，让每个人都能负担得起送货上门，并减少污染和拥堵。
安全
Nuro的使命和商业模式的核心是生产一种独特安全的车辆，利用提供货物交付的特殊优势来创造乘用车无法实现的创新。
这种理念贯穿于公司的工程方法。我们的车辆设计为完全自动驾驶。我们的技术不断学习它所见到的每一种情况，与我们运营的其他车辆分享这种学习。它被编程为始终练习防御性驾驶，与人类驾驶员不同，它永远不会分心。
在美国，2016年有超过3000人因驾驶相关的车祸事故而死亡，超过37,000人死于各种事故。通过避免造成94％所有事故的人为错误，像Nuro这样的自动驾驶车辆每年在美国拯救数千人的生命的潜力，以及全世界超过一百万人的生命。
我们的车辆设计比几乎任何其他车辆都更安全 - 它比乘用车更轻，更窄更灵活，并且以更低的速度运行。这种方法使我们有更多的时间做出反应，缩短停车距离，并为车辆侧面提供额外的安全缓冲。这些优点共同有助于防止标准车辆无法避免的事故，例如有人从停放的汽车之间跳出或在道路上转弯。
Nuro’s Safety Innovations
Nuro’s groundbreaking approach of building a vehicle without passengers let us reimagine the car. Our custom vehicle will introduce innovative ways to improve safety for other road users, so we can focus on keeping what’s outside safer than what’s inside.
1. Lower speed operation
Nuro’s vehicle is designed to operate exclusively at or below 25 miles per hour. That low speed gives us more time to react and prevent collisions. Having no passengers means we can take the extra time to drive carefully and always stay on the side of safety.
2. Lighter, narrower, and more nimble vehicle
Without passengers, there’s no need for leather seats or stereos, a steering wheel or power windows. Removing all that equipment lets us use a much narrower frame — about half the width of a typical car — which gives our vehicle more space to navigate around obstructions and a few more feet of safety buffer to avoid a collision if someone were to suddenly pull out of a driveway or step out from between parked cars. It also reduces our weight to about half that of a typical car, further shortening the stopping distance.
3. Ability to self-sacrifice
In the unlikely case of a vehicle ever encountering an unavoidable collision scenario, a driverless, passengerless vehicle also has the unique opportunity to prioritize the safety of humans, other road users, and occupied vehicles over its contents.
4. Safety-enhanced vehicle front-end
We are engineering our vehicle with particular attention to minimizing the physical harm in the event of a pedestrian strike. While our top priority is to avoid collisions, we recognize it is possible that we could be involved in a collision at some point. Our reduced mass and low speed will reduce the force of any potential impact relative to a passenger car, and we also designed the vehicle to provide additional pedestrian protection. The overall rounded contouring is engineered such that objects coming into contact with the vehicle are more likely to glance off, rather than suffer a perpendicular strike. Unlike traditional vehicles, which are engineered to protect the passengers inside with hard, protective materials, we use softer materials for the front and rear panels, and a front-end design that acts as a “crumple zone” to minimize the potential for injury.
Nuro的安全创新
Nuro在没有乘客的情况下制造车辆的开创性方法让我们重新构想了这款车。我们的定制车辆将引入创新方法来提高其他道路使用者的安全性，因此我们可以专注于保持外部比内部更安全。
1.低速运行
Nuro的车辆设计为以每小时25英里或更低的速度运行。低速使我们有更多时间做出反应并防止碰撞。没有乘客意味着我们可以花费额外的时间小心驾驶并始终保持安全。
2.更轻，更窄，更灵活的车辆
没有乘客，就不需要真皮座椅或立体声音响，方向盘或电动车窗。拆除所有设备让我们使用更窄的框架 - 大约是典型汽车宽度的一半 - 这使我们的车辆有更多的空间来绕过障碍物和更多的安全缓冲区，以避免碰撞，如果有人突然撤出一条车道或从停放的汽车之间走出来。它还将我们的重量减轻到典型汽车的一半左右，进一步缩短了停车距离。
3.自我牺牲的能力
在车辆遇到不可避免的碰撞情况的不太可能的情况下，无人驾驶的无乘客车辆也具有优先考虑人员，其他道路使用者和被占用车辆对其内容的安全性的独特机会。
4.安全性增强的车辆前端
我们正在设计我们的车辆，特别注意尽量减少行人罢工时的人身伤害。虽然我们的首要任务是避免碰撞，但我们认识到我们可能会在某些时候参与碰撞。我们减少质量和低速将减少相对于乘用车的任何潜在影响的力量，我们还设计了车辆以提供额外的行人保护。整体圆形轮廓被设计成使得与车辆接触的物体更可能瞥一眼，而不是遭受垂直撞击。与传统车辆不同，传统车辆设计用于保护内部乘客的硬质保护材料，我们使用较软的材料制作前后面板，前端设计充当“防撞区”，以尽量减少受伤的可能性。
We designed our vehicle to bring the highest performance components together with cutting edge software. From the standpoint of the vehicle’s self-driving driving system, our custom hardware is among the industry’s most advanced, incorporating 12 cameras providing high-definition, constant, and 360° views of the environment from various elevations and with overlapping vantages; top-mounted LIDAR to provide precise representations of the surrounding area and movements; radar for detecting objects and estimating their velocity even at long range; ultrasonics and audio sensors for additional sensing coverage and redundancy; and on-board computing power capable of running all aspects of driving onboard and without the limitations of network connectivity. All driving and safety-critical systems are redundant, including backups for computing, steering, power, sensing, throttle, and braking systems. The vehicle also checks for errors hundreds of times per second, ensuring all systems are operating safely. With respect to software, the system implements world-leading computer vision powered by advanced machine learning — capable of continual improvement.
Underlying this hardware and software is a precision-engineered, U.S.-built vehicle chassis that has — as a core design principle — a goal of not only meeting, but in many cases dramatically exceeding the specified safety requirements for a vehicle of our size and speed. For example, our vehicle features braking components with the power and performance of brakes that can stop full-speed passenger vehicles with twice our weight.
Our vehicles and their self-driving systems undergo extensive testing, including a wide range of critical safety scenarios that require immediate response to prevent harm. It is important to us that as we develop our technology and move closer to full self-driving, our testing itself is safe for the public. Before any Nuro vehicles operate in self-driving mode on public roads, we conduct extensive bench testing, computer modeling, simulated testing, and driving on private roads, all using hundreds of common and uncommon scenarios tested thousands of times. Our testing always uses highly-trained safety drivers as a backup.
Our approach to safety also emphasizes people-centric design, considering safety throughout the user experience. Each detail of the experience of picking up your groceries is designed to be not only easy but safe. For example, we designed the compartment’s size and position with ergonomics in mind, so customers do not have to bend over to lift groceries. The doors open without swinging far out, enabling the vehicle to parallel park close to the curb and avoid blocking cars, while also allowing customers to stand nearby without getting bumped by an opening compartment door. Safety was a big concern even on issues as fundamental as the vehicle’s size — we wanted it to be easily seen by others on the road, but not block their view.
我们设计的车辆将最高性能的组件与尖端软件结合在一起。从车辆自动驾驶系统的角度来看，我们的定制硬件是业界最先进的，包含12个摄像头，可从各种高度和重叠的高度提供高清晰度，恒定和360°的环境视图;顶部安装的激光雷达，提供周围区域和运动的精确表示;用于探测物体并在远距离估计其速度的雷达;超声波和音频传感器，用于额外的传感覆盖和冗余;和板载计算能力，能够运行板载驾驶的所有方面，并且没有网络连接的限制。所有驱动和安全关键系统都是冗余的，包括计算，转向，动力，传感，油门和制动系统的备份。车辆还每秒检查数百次错误，确保所有系统都安全运行。在软件方面，该系统采用先进的机器学习技术实现世界领先的计算机视觉 - 能够持续改进。
这种硬件和软件的基础是精密设计的美国制造的车辆底盘 - 作为核心设计原则 - 不仅满足要求，而且在许多情况下大大超过了我们规模和速度的车辆的特定安全要求。例如，我们的车辆具有制动部件，其功率和制动性能可以使重量减轻两倍的全速乘用车停止。
我们的车辆及其自动驾驶系统经过了广泛的测试，包括各种需要立即响应以防止伤害的关键安全方案。对我们来说重要的是，随着我们开发技术并接近完全自动驾驶，我们的测试本身对公众来说是安全的。在任何Nuro车辆在公共道路上以自动驾驶模式运行之前，我们进行了广泛的基准测试，计算机建模，模拟测试以及在私人道路上驾驶，所有这些都使用了数百次常见且不常见的情景测试数千次。我们的测试始终使用训练有素的安全驱动程序作为备份。
我们的安全方法也强调以人为本的设计，考虑到整个用户体验的安全性。采摘杂货的每一个细节都不仅简单而且安全。例如，我们在设计车厢的尺寸和位置时考虑到了人体工程学，因此客户无需弯腰就可以提起杂货。门打开时没有向外摆动，使车辆能够平行停放在路边附近并避免堵车，同时还允许顾客站在附近而不会被开门车厢撞到。即使在与车辆尺寸一样重要的问题上，安全也是一个大问题 - 我们希望其他人在路上能够轻松看到它，但不能阻挡他们的观点。