Voyage Uses Skylark to Enable Autonomous Taxi Fleet

“Swift has been a key partner on our journey to create safer, more comfortable and more affordable autonomous driving experience for our customers.”

Oliver Cameron, co-founder & CEO, Voyage

Voyage is working to create safer, more comfortable and more affordable transportation options, powered by autonomous driving technology, for communities all across North America. Voyage enables its community members to summon on-demand self-driving taxis and move effortlessly from one destination to the next.

The challenge facing the founding team at Voyage was to quickly deploy self-driving technology in a real-world environment that delivers a low-cost, reliable and safe transportation solution. While competitors within the autonomous driving space often develop their technologies within the confines of labs and are constrained by the complexities of local legislation, Voyage has expedited the roll-out of a true production application of self-driving cars within private communities to constantly improve and iterate its technologies and provide a better user experience.

The Voyage fleet stays within the bounds of a given community, where all roads have been precisely mapped, speed limits are lower, and traffic patterns are more clearly defined than in metropolitan cities. Voyage’s approach makes it possible for them to deliver a self-driving taxi service to a community in a matter of months. The first community that Voyage has deployed its self-driving fleet within is The Villages in San Jose, California. Residents in The Villages (a community of 4,000) are able to summon a Voyage self-driving taxi using a smartphone app and have a ride waiting at their front door. This service is especially valuable to customers with mobility limitations that might prevent them from walking to an event or reaching a bus stop down the street.

Voyage uses Swift’s Skylark Precise Positioning Service in its navigation sensor suite to be able to deliver this self-driving technology to communities. The manpower and overhead that would have been required by the Voyage team to develop centimeter-accurate GPS technology in-house was offset by Swift’s end-to-end autonomous driving solution. The precise centimeter-level localization delivered by Swift is critical to the needs of the communities that Voyage serves since its customer base, especially those with mobility issues, require the car to arrive as close to their front door as possible and their rides to have a smooth start and stop.

Voyage has been using Skylark for the entire deployment in San Jose and is actively providing rides every day, improving quality of life for residents. Voyage will next utilize Skylark in its upcoming deployment launching to 125,000 retirees at The Villages complex in Florida. Voyage is expanding community-by-community across the country and with each deployment is targeting communities with more residents, more roads and its own set of unique challenges.

Voyage was acquired by GM’s Cruise in 2021.