Auro Robotics Deploys Its First Driverless Shuttles On Santa Clara University Campus

Will college students soon be taking autonomous shuttles between classes and other places that they want to go on campus?

Auro Robotics, a spin-off startup from IIT Kharagpur robotics research group, has been working for the past four years on the development of a driverless shuttle based on autonomous vehicle technology. Now, the company is testing its driverless system at several universities and is actually starting to deploy shuttles on the campus of Santa Clara University.

Although Google has made great advancements in its self-driving car initiatives, is it about to feel some serious competition from this ambitious new startup company?

Auro Robotics has plans to expand to other markets outside of college campuses as well, including amusement parks, retirement communities and small islands, indicating that projects in those spaces are set to move forward “in the later part of this year.” Auro is focusing on small, contained environments largely because they are controlled by private corporations, and are therefore not subject to the heavy government regulations that Google and other companies have to deal with for their self-driving cars.

“The unique advantage this strategy gives us is that we are able to mobilize the shuttles now instead of waiting for the next five or 10 years for laws to get through,” said Auro Robotics CEO Nalin Gupta.

Gupta told Techcrunch that the main challenge in designing an autonomous vehicle for this purpose is building one that can smartly and safely navigate heavy pedestrian traffic, something that he says his team has been fine-tuning over time. The team creates a three-dimensional map of the environments that they’re going to deploy the shuttles in, to ensure that the vehicles can be as responsive and aware of their surroundings as possible.

Auro Robotics was originally founded in India by Gupta and his team, who graduated from the same university as Sundar Pichai, who was recently appointed CEO of Google’s core business. Auro is backed by American seed fund Y Combinator, based in Mountain View, California.

Considering all of the different players in the race to bring self-driving cars to the public, efficiency is definitely important to Auro as it hopes to break out and become one of the dominant players in the autonomous shuttle space. Gupta and his team are rapidly making improvements to the components of their vehicles to make them as intelligent as possible, relying on several third-party technologies such as Polysync to reduce the amount of time that it takes for the company to get their vehicles to market.

Auro is currently working on two separate models of their shuttles so that the vehicles will be able to either follow a closed-loop route with pre-defined stops, or be able to be called on-demand to pick up a user and drop them off at a location that they define.

There are many differing opinions about how long it’s going to take for self-driving cars to become commonplace on our roads, but it appears that Auro may be close to bringing this technology to college campuses across the country.