Junior Achievement of Southwest Virginia lauds founder of TORC Robotics

Michael Fleming has driven company from college project to partner with Daimler

Blacksburg – From a dune buggy-looking vehicle on an obstacle course, to the streets of Blacksburg and even Las Vegas – and now 18-wheelers on interstate 81 – it’s been quite a journey for Michael Fleming and TORC, the company he founded after graduating from Virginia Tech.

“I found my passion early on and was pretty fortunate.  The program was self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles,” Fleming said.

At Virginia Tech Fleming worked on the technology to make a vehicle drive by itself.  It was so early in the game that the term, self-driving vehicle hadn’t yet been coined.  
The technology, though advanced, wasn’t any more developed than the language.  

Progress started with something called the DARPA Challenge, a contest where college students attempted to instruct a driverless vehicle to navigate an obstacle course,

“And the cool thing about it is if you won, you’d get $1million dollars.  So the students and I worked day and night – in the lab, building and breaking and re-building.  We got real excited for the first DARPA Challenge and failed miserably, just like everyone else," he said.

But Fleming saw the possibilities for the technology and for business.

“And I walked down the hall to my adviser and said,'Hey we have an incredible group of students, great technology.  We should spin a company off, said Fleming.  “We started out in a 10-by-12 office.  And today we’ve got about 40,000 square feet so it’s been interesting going through that growth.” 

Today, TORC’s software is state of the art, using a three point navigation system that senses, thinks and acts. It includes cameras, radar and LIDAR, which sends out millions of light pulses at a time.

Onboard cameras reveal how the car knows how to handle a cyclist.
Then there are what TORC calls bad actors – drivers or people who are unpredictable. 

“It’s very difficult to predict human behavior when that behavior may be viewed as irrational,” Fleming said.

In one instance the car responds safely when a pedestrian walks across the street without looking. In another, the TORC vehicle stops and yields when a car comes at it the wrong way on a one-way street.
“We’ve been operating on public roads here in Blacksburg for 13 years, incident free, and safety has always been paramount here in the TORC organization,” Fleming said.

The technology is expensive, but it’s proved its mettle in the mining industry and with the military, where bigger budgets allow TORC’s technology to prove its cost effectiveness over the long term.  

So much so that TORC recently reached an agreement with Daimler to supply the technology for self-driving trucks and buses, something that’s already being tested in Virginia with a safety driver behind the wheel.

That means more technology and more growth for TORC.

“So when we made the announcement in March that TORC was going to join the Daimler family, we wanted to let the community know that TORC would be an independent company within the Daimler family.  The management team would stay intact, the TORC name would stay intact, and we would be able to leverage the resources of one of the largest OEM’s within the world.
 


About the Author:

John Carlin co-anchors the 5, 5:30, 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts on WSLS 10.