Argo AI Rideshare and Delivery Services

  • September 28, 2022
  • William Payne

Argo AI has launched a broad line-up of autonomous vehicle technologies for ride-sharing and goods delivery operations. The product suite is designed to be used by businesses of any scale.

Argo integrated input from a range of companies into its product design and development process, which allowed the company to develop tools that serve ride hail and ride pooling, and middle- and last-mile delivery. It is currently operating consumer-facing ridesharing with Lyft, and autonomous goods delivery with Walmart.

The Argo Autonomy Platform consists of software, hardware, high definition maps, and backend support. There are six products: Argo Drive; Argo Lidar; Argo Map; and Argo Hub.

Argo Drive is self-driving software and hardware designed to sense the vehicle’s surroundings in 360 degrees, detect other road users and predict their actions, and direct the steering, braking and acceleration to safely plan the vehicle’s trajectory.

Argo Lidar is the company’s proprietary long-range sensor. It is capable of over 400 metres range with camera-like resolution and single photon detection to recognise dark objects, like black-painted vehicles, early and with high precision. Argo Lidar is already being manufactured and has been integrated across the entire Argo fleet.

Argo Map is a high-definition map network incorporating roadways, traffic infrastructure, and speed limits. Argo has developed a turnkey process for map expansion in existing and new markets, which enables rapid scale to new cities. In the past year, Argo doubled its total mapped mileage and added two new cities to its portfolio.

Argo Hub is a suite of cloud tools and infrastructure to support autonomous vehicles in the field. Argo Hub includes remote guidance and remote troubleshooting support, as well as map zone management to communicate real-time road changes to Argo autonomous vehicles.

Argo Connect is designed to be the gateway to Argo’s product ecosystem. It leverages a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to let businesses integrate Argo-powered autonomous vehicles into their existing operations.

The Argo Autonomy Platform is trained with data from extensive testing in eight cities across the United States and Germany. It’s capable of navigating safely around pedestrians, bicyclists, construction, heavy traffic, and more on dense urban streets, suburban roads, and highways.

The platform is proven to be compatible with multiple vehicle types across automakers, from electric or hybrid vehicles, to sedans, SUVs or vans. This flexibility supports a variety of go-to-market applications, from urban rideshare to middle- and last-mile deliveries.

Argo Autonomy Solutions comprise Argo Operations and Argo Fleet, and are designed for businesses to supplement in-house capabilities. Argo Operations is a set of in-market services to help businesses deploy and operate autonomous vehicles. Businesses can opt in to field operations teams and tools for on-the-ground vehicle management, rider and delivery customer service, and rapid response.

A set of products of products designed to maximise fleet uptime, Argo Fleet is designed to meet service and operational needs of autonomous vehicles. This includes support for terminal activities like sensor calibration, data ingest, self-driving system startup and shutdown. It gives business owners real-time visibility into the status of each autonomous vehicle, tools to manage vehicle and personnel schedules, and access to on-site support for specialised autonomous vehicle maintenance.

“Advancements in autonomy will improve the safety and accessibility of our roads, while also solving real business challenges,” said Brett Browning, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Product Development, Argo AI. “By creating this full suite of products and services, Argo offers businesses across a broad range of industries everything they need to take advantage of self-driving technology at scale.”