Aurora's self-driving system needed more motorcycle experience. So a biker club helped out.

The San Francisco chapter of the Iron Order Motorcycle Club doesn't usually concern itself much with self-driving cars, but autonomous vehicle company Aurora recently spent the day driving around with the club's bikers.

Aurora, the company co-founded by former Tesla Autopilot head Sterling Anderson, is developing an autonomous driving system it calls Aurora Driver. That system, like all self-driving programs, needs practice on the road, whether that's in autonomous mode logging real-world miles on public roads, in a computer simulation, or being manually driven. Its perception system is taking in everything around it: pedestrians, bicycles, other cars, trucks, delivery vans, e-scooters, errant shopping carts, construction crews, and, yes, motorcycles. That data is used to predict and react to future scenarios on the road. Read more...