ENNIS, Texas — If you were near Ennis in Ellis County the past two days, and traveling on I-45, you might have noticed a police officer roughly 70-miles out of his usual jurisdiction pulling over a big-rig truck on the shoulder of the highway.
But the Frisco Police Department commercial vehicle enforcement officer is part of the data-gathering process being used to figure out how to pull over that same big-rig some day when it doesn't have a driver at all.
"What you witnessed was a mock traffic stop," said Grant Cottingham with Frisco Police.
Frisco has partnered with Aurora, the transportation company featured earlier this year on WFAA, that is using the I-45 corridor near Ennis and Palmer as part of its training program for autonomous trucks.
"We're driving autonomous loads everyday on Texas highways," Aurora President Ossa Fisher told us this past November.
This week, with help from the Frisco Police Department, the company is training its system of radar, lidar, and cameras what to do if a police agency needs it to pull over. The mock traffic stops also give Frisco Police a chance to learn what to do when the vehicles eventually are fully autonomous -- without a human in the cab at all.
"We get to understand more about autonomous vehicles and how they are going to respond to us," Cottingham said.
The autonomous functions of the Aurora systems, trained to respond to police lights and sirens, also dictate that the vehicle be able to change lanes safely if law enforcement already has someone else pulled over to the shoulder of the highway.
"So we can teach the Aurora driver what it should do when a police officer or somebody from law enforcement or first responder comes up behind them," Aurora VP of Government Relations Gerardo Interiano told WFAA. "And to be able to teach the Aurora driver to do what a human would do in that same circumstance."
"And so that way, they can collect the data to ensure that their vehicles on the road are as safe as they possibly can be," added Cottingham after the Wednesday morning mock traffic stop demonstration in Ennis.
"For Texans today, the reality is there is a possibility that one of their packages has already been delivered by a self-driving truck," said Interiano. "I think that's the exciting thing about the work that we're doing."
The company reports that it has already full mapped out shipping routes from Dallas to Houston and back, and each direction between Fort Worth and El Paso. Human monitors, gathering data and standing by if the Aurora Technology needs assistance, continue to travel in the vehicles now.
The company goal, with continued help from police agencies like Frisco, is to go fully autonomous by the end of 2024.