Houston may be known for putting a man on the moon, but it is now known for another milestone: the first fully unmanned validation of an autonomous truck. Bot Auto announced Tuesday that it had successfully completed the first driverless hub-to-hub run in Houston, Texas. 

It was completed without any human inside the cab. The Houston-based autonomous trucking company executed the run at sunset, using a truck operated without anyone in the cab or remote assistance. The fully autonomous truck, named after a famous NASA astronaut, navigated real-world traffic conditions without the need of mission control.

According to the company, this was not a commercial launch but rather a milestone, the first of many validations in the two years since the company’s founding.

“For an outsider, it might seem like, ‘Yeah, this is a truck. What’s the difference between this truck and one from a year ago when you still had a safety driver?’ And I’d say it’s heaven and earth in terms of the difference. For example, with a human, you can always fall back on the human. But with this autonomous system, there’s no human,” said Xiaodi Hou, founder and CEO of Bot Auto, in an interview with FreightWaves.

Before the run, Bot Auto completed its end-to-end safety verification and validation for the defined operational design domain (ODD), including rigorous closed-course autonomy testing. Additionally, the truck was equipped with multiple layers of redundancy, including diversified redundancy, continuous health monitoring and verified minimum-risk fallback.

Another key milestone for Bot Auto was the completion of its internal verification and validation. Hou likens the completion of the V&V validation to mountaineering; multiple validations establish base camps, with fully driverless tests being a part of that path to a commercial driverless summit.

“It’s important to tell people we’ve completed our first V&V validation. That’s a signal of where we are. If I may use a mountaineer analogy: We’re aiming for Annapurna or Mount Everest. We’re now at base camp. We tweet about it once, then move to the next camp. Repeating the same driverless run would be like taking selfies every day at base camp. It’s not what we do,” said Hou.

Another challenge in the autonomy space is that the rate of change is rapid, from hardware improvements to algorithm changes. Similar rapid changes are observed in the AI space, where companies routinely announce new breakthroughs every other month. Hou notes that the rapid tempo is also being felt in the autonomous trucking space. However, there’s another challenge: These trucks must make money.

“This validation run is a meaningful step, but it’s a waypoint, not the destination,” Hou said in a news release. “Success is simple: Autonomy must beat human cost-per-mile, consistently and safely. And at Bot Auto, humanless means no human—not in the driver’s seat, not in the back seat and not behind a remote joystick.”

As Bot Auto continues to refine its technology and hardware, the mountaineer analogy comes back into play, with it creating a new V&V process and repeating the same process that led to this fully humanless run.

“First, for every new lane, they all have to go through the same V&V process. This is an expansion of the operational design domain—we shouldn’t assume it’s automatically compatible. We need to validate and have evidence to show ourselves we made a conscious decision,” Hou said.

Hou added that, apart from that, the V&V process needs to go quicker and quicker. “Our first V&V took three months exactly—May, June, July to complete before the launch. Before May, we developed functions like graceful pullovers. From May to July, we tested. Now, I foresee another two to three months, but we’re shrinking it,” he said.

Hou noted that another benefit compared to his TuSimple days is that the rapid iterations in generative AI and innovations mean his company spends less money to catch up more quickly. Additionally, a smaller and more nimble team means less cash burn at a time when many largely funded autonomous companies announced they were going public via SPACs.

“We delivered our first driverless with only $41 million spent. That’s very important … probably one or two weeks’ burn for other companies.”

Bot Auto has been operating fully autonomous commercial operations between Houston and San Antonio, Texas, in recent months with a safety driver. Looking ahead, Bot Auto plans its first humanless commercial cargo run between its Houston and San Antonio hubs in the near future.

For now, this fully humanless run was the only trip conducted, but Hou expects more to come.

“So far, it’s a single run, but we have scheduled visits and fundraising—investor visits. We’ll deliver more runs later this month or early next month,” Hou said.