Meet Randy Reibel, Aurora’s VP of Lidar and the founder of Blackmore

At the heart of Aurora’s technology and mission are the individuals behind it. In our series, Aurora Voices, we share the unique voices and stories of the people of Aurora, celebrating our backgrounds as well as personal and professional experiences.

By Sterling Anderson, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer

Winning in the self-driving space requires moving quickly and decisively on foundational technical investments in hardware, software, and development tools. Such investments can be tough to make, as they often come at the expense of more visible near-term progress. These investments also require tremendous experience and conviction: experience to know where to place these bets, and conviction to stay the course until their returns are realized.

We’ve just realized a rather significant return on some early investments in the rapid development, build, commissioning, and commercial deployment of our next-generation self-driving trucks. Powered by the Aurora Driver, these trucks are designed to operate safely on highways, where prevailing speeds impose exacting requirements on the range and resolution of the sensors. …

At Aurora, we make decisions deliberately. From our experience, we know that focusing on the smartest approach — even if it isn’t the easiest or most obvious — will pay dividends down the road for delivering our technology safely, quickly, and broadly.

An example of this is the Aurora Test Site Network. Though every self-driving company needs a closed site to test its technology, we knew creating a robust and effective system from existing tracks would help us move as quickly and safely as possible.

With half a dozen locations and counting, the Aurora Test Site Network allows us to efficiently test, validate, and make rapid progress on the Aurora Driver in a variety of geographies near our growing areas of development. This breadth allows us to test the Aurora Driver on many different scenarios, ultimately giving us the ability to develop a Driver for all vehicle types and purposes. …

As development and commercialization speed up, executives join from General Motors, Lyft, and Cray Inc.

2020 has been a year none of us expected, but we’re proud of the progress we’ve been able to make. We’re testing our fleet in Texas, expanding to a new Pittsburgh headquarters, and we’re excited to announce we’re now 600 people strong and have hired new senior engineering and business leaders. While developing the best technology safely and quickly is at the core of everything we do, bringing the Aurora Driver to market is also a top priority — first in middle mile trucking applications, then in last-mile goods delivery, and finally, in passenger mobility networks. …

Meet Henry Partida, our STEM enthusiast and Army veteran from our Hardware Engineering team.

Since our founding in 2017, Aurora has always had a headquarters in Pittsburgh, and it’s been home to many firsts. It’s where we drove down a test track in autonomy for the first time, and where we first autonomously navigated tunnels and drove in snow. We were also the first AV company to receive official authorization from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to test our cars in the state. …

Meet Luis Velez, one of our first Truck Operations Specialists. Luis hails from Colombia and whole-heartedly believes that self-driving technology will be a catalyst for positive change for many, especially truck drivers.

Meet Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli, our former US trade negotiator and multilingual Director of Partner Product and Programs.