CVPR 2026 Recap: Torc’s Mission Intersects With Event Trends of Physical, Multi-Modal AI, Deployable Systems

by Kiley Thompson | Jun 11, 2026 | AI, Featured

Advancing the Future of Autonomous Driving

CVPR 2026 marked its largest edition to date, bringing together more than 10,000 attendees and setting a new record with 16,092 paper submissions. With an acceptance rate of just 25%, the conference continues to maintain its reputation for rigor and selectivity even amid rapid growth.

This year’s event highlighted several defining trends in computer vision and AI. Multi-modal AI emerged as a major focus, doubling its presence among top papers year over year. At the same time, research in 3D and 4D reconstruction, world models, and autonomous driving saw significant momentum, signaling a broader shift toward systems capable of understanding and interacting with complex, dynamic environments.

These trends align closely with Torc’s mission.

A Strong Presence on the Global Stage

As a platinum sponsor alongside partner NVIDIA and other industry leaders, we were proud to represent the cutting edge of autonomous freight vehicle innovation.

Our booth welcomed hundreds of visitors, where attendees explored one of our autonomous Freightliner Cascadia trucks and experienced our immersive VR demonstration. Guests also had the opportunity to engage directly with Torc’s experts, including Head of AI Felix Heide and members of our AI team and engineers, for in-depth discussions on physical AI and the future of autonomous systems.

Research Contributions

Torc’s presence at CVPR extended beyond the show floor through research and thought leadership:

TruckDrive: Long-Range Autonomous Highway Driving Dataset
A multimodal dataset designed to advance perception systems for long-range highway driving in autonomous trucking.
Workshop Participation
Felix Heide contributed to two workshops:
- X-band Radar Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging
- Unified Robotic Vision with Cross-Modal Sensing and Alignment

Looking Ahead

CVPR 2026 underscored a clear turning point in AI: A shift from perception-centric models to multi-modal, generative, and embodied systems capable of full 3D world understanding and real-world deployment.

We’re proud to be at the forefront of this technology and grateful to everyone who connected with Torc during the event.

Stay connected with Torc on social channels to see where we’ll be next.

ACT Expo 2026 Recap: Two Torc Trucks Are Better Than One

by Kiley Thompson | May 14, 2026 | Featured, News

act-expo-2026-peter-vaughan-schmidt-panel

ACT Expo 2026 once again brought together the most influential voices in commercial transportation in Las Vegas. As North America’s largest advanced transportation technology event, the May 4-7 event served as a key meeting point where innovation, policy, and real-world deployment converged.

Torc trucks were front in center in not one booth, but two. Penske Transportation Solutions and Torc’s parent company, Daimler Truck, were both event presenting sponsors, and each took the opportunity to showcase Torc autonomous-ready Freightliner Cascadia vehicles, featuring TorcDrive, in their booths.

“I think the hurdles have shifted,” said Peter Vaughan Schmidt, Torc CEO, during the Virtual Driver Revolutionizing Trucking and Logistics panel on Tuesday, May 5. “In the past, it was really proving that your technology is really working. And as things come together both with compute and with range and end to end AI, I think the real hurdle is proving to customers that it seamlessly fits and provides a better fit for them — that you can run autonomous trucks from point to point, not just hub to hub.”

Watch the full session here:

“We are the only ones that actually run on production-intent hardware and software. That’s needed for scale… at low cost, high quality and high volume,” said Peter. “That’s our race to produce a safe and scalable product for our customers.”

The 2026 event spotlighted the technologies shaping the future of fleets, including autonomous vehicles, battery-electric, hydrogen fuel cell, and near-zero emissions solutions, along with the infrastructure and software required to scale them. Industry leaders, OEMs, fleet operators, utilities, and policymakers shared insights focused on accelerating the transition to cleaner, more efficient transportation.

Beyond the exhibit hall, ACT Expo 2026 offered in-depth educational sessions covering total cost of ownership, charging and fueling strategies, regulatory updates, and real-world case studies from fleets already leading the transition.

With collaboration and innovation at its core, ACT Expo 2026 helped fleets conceptualize and jumpstart the move from ambition to action, and Torc was there as a physical representation of that action, twice over.

Panelists at the ACT Expo 2026 Virtual Driver Revolutionizing Trucking and Logistics session

Image courtesy of ACT Expo

Digital AI vs. Physical AI: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters

by Kiley Thompson | Apr 15, 2026 | Education, Featured, Technology

Have you used AI to streamline your work or generate a list for you? Have you been fooled by an AI image? The technology we’ve been watching in movies for 20 years is now in our homes, cars, phones, and schools. Artificial intelligence is no longer theoretical. Most people—across industries and age groups—interact with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Work apps like Zoom now offer AI summaries, and Microsoft and Adobe have generative AI tools built into their products. This widespread exposure has created a shared baseline: AI is useful, real, and improving quickly.

But there’s a critical distinction that’s still not widely understood—digital AI vs. physical AI.

Digital AI:

Intelligence On-screen

Digital AI operates in a purely virtual environment. It processes text, images, and data to:
• Answer questions
• Generate content
• Analyze patterns
• Support decision-making

Its rapid rise wasn’t accidental. Digital AI benefited from a massive, ready-made dataset: human language and images. For decades, we’ve been writing, storing, and digitizing information—emails, documents, books, photos, websites. It’s been trained on the Internet: the largest repository of language and visuals in human history.

Once that data became accessible, AI systems could be trained quickly and at scale.

That’s why digital AI feels like it “appeared overnight.” It was trained “in the cloud” of ever-expanding data centers, allowing for rapid iteration.

Physical AI:

Intelligence in the Real World

Physical AI takes the same foundational technologies as digital, on-screen AI—machine learning and neural networks—and applies them to real-world interactions.

Instead of predicting the next word, physical AI must decide:
• What object am I seeing?
• How do I move around safely?
• How hard should I grip this item?
• What action should I take next?

This introduces massive complexity. Instead of just structured data, physical AI must work within the real, unstructured environment, around people and things that don’t always follow the rules. The real world isn’t just data—it’s dynamic, unpredictable, and only governed by physics.

Physical AI needs to account for the 3D space of dimensions, with sensors, actuators, and an understanding of interactions and their outcomes.

Why Physical AI Is Slower to Scale (for Now)

When we built digital AI systems, we chose the right dataset by only using some parts of the internet. Chatbots were built using mostly social media data; Coding Agents were built using mostly open source code data.

Physical AI also requires special data for real world use cases. The world is extremely complex, and the sensors that “see” it can also be complex. But, this time, we can’t just look on the Internet to “find” it. The sensors we use, the environments in which robots move, and the special situations we have to prepare for have simply not been recorded.

Unlike digital AI, physical AI lacks a rich historical dataset like the Internet. There’s no ready made data set for how humans move through environments, how objects behave under force, or how tasks are physically completed. All the physical data must be created, not just collected.

The same generative tools that you use in digital AI can be applied within a simulated world, using real-world, grounded physics, and the physical AI hardware (robots and sensors) can be built alongside the AI. We don’t always have to wait for a robot to go out into the world, record the data, and bring it back to us – the robot isn’t ready yet! Companies like NVIDIA, Tesla, and Amazon are accelerating this by combining compute power, simulation, and real-world data collection.

At Torc, our autonomous driving system, TorcDrive, is being trained to work in the real world using both real-world data (recorded camera and lidar images of on-road driving) as well as complex simulated images created from those same on-road recordings, simultaneously.

The Key Insight: Same Brain, Different Body

The most important takeaway is this: digital AI and physical AI are built on the same core technology. Digital AI is proving what’s possible and adaptable by humans, and most importantly, helpful. Physical AI extends that capability into the real world. Everything you’ve seen AI do on a screen—learning, adapting, improving—will eventually happen in the physical world.

What This Means for the Freight Industry

For freight, logistics, and operations, digital AI helps companies and people think better … physical AI can help you perform better.

At Torc, physical AI is manifested in our autonomous driving software, TorcDrive, and powered by AV 3.0, on our trucks today, after being trained by millions of hours of real world and simulated scenarios. It’s the realization of the promises of hundreds of years of technology and human invention. We are still in early days of building physical AI but the trajectory is clear. Digital AI and physical AI aren’t separate revolutions. They are one and the same.

Meet Your First Physical AI

A physical AI machine you might be familiar with is the in-house robot vacuum. The simplest vacuum has the most basic sensors to register the world around it. If it bumps into something, the computer registers the bump against the moveable panel and turns the wheels to rotate itself in a different direction. Other more expensive models can use sensors to determine floor material, and then adjust how they clean accordingly.

More Going On Under the Hood

There are robot vacuum models with self-emptying functions, pet sensors, and even self-cleaning controls. One of the newest models introduced at CES 2025 even has a robotic arm to pick up socks. As we transition to a more physical AI world, how physical AI “understands” and interacts with its surroundings is very different “under the hood” (or dust bin, in this analogy). It’s becoming more complex, and smarter, and importantly, more applicable and helpful.

Not All Physical AI Thinks the Same

How different physical AI instances and machines “think” and how they must act on their sensors vary widely. It is critical to keep in mind that systems are running ever-increasing AI models, trained on real world and simulation data, designed to interact with the physical world in more capable ways, far exceeding the scalability (and capability) of the first physical AI technologies.

Freight Industry Physical AI Key Applications and Workflows

Autonomous Warehouse Operations
Intelligent Fleet Management & Safety
Dynamic Load Optimization
Automated Material Handling
And of course … Autonomous Vehicles

Dave Anderson Joins the Technology Leadership Team as VP of Engineering for Torc’s Enablement Division

by Kiley Thompson | Sep 25, 2025 | News

Rebeca Delgado, VP Engineering – Autonomy Applications

BLACKSBURG, Va – September 25, 2025 – Torc Robotics, an independent subsidiary of Daimler Truck AG and a pioneer in commercializing self-driving vehicle technology, today announced the addition of Dave Anderson, who has joined the Technology Leadership Team as the VP of Engineering for our Enablement Division.

Dave brings over 25 years of experience in technology leadership and innovation. He served as Vice President and Head of Strategy for Marelli and as Vice President of Innovation at Lear Corporation. Additionally, he was the Sr. Director of Autonomous Driving Platforms at Toyota Research Institute and the Director of Technology for Samsung Strategy & Innovation Center where he was responsible for open innovation, architecture development, and technical innovation in automotive, including the areas of ADAS and Autonomous Driving. Prior to joining Samsung, he led automotive integration for NVIDIA, developing advanced concepts for vehicle cockpit and autonomous vehicles. Dave has also held several engineering and technical roles at Altera, SiriusXM Radio, and Visteon. He was most recently with Codethink, based in Manchester, UK.

He also holds multiple international patents for embedded mobility applications, and in 2015, he was named a Rising Star by Automotive News. He earned his Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from Purdue University, as well as graduating from the Engineering Leadership Program at UC Berkeley.

Based in Ann Arbor, MI, Dave is active in his community and enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife and three kids.

About Torc Robotics

Torc, headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia, is a global leader and pioneer in trucking. Founded in 2005 at the birth of the self-driving technology, Torc has 20 years of experience in pioneering safety-critical, self-driving applications. Torc is working toward a complete self-driving vehicle software and integration solution and is currently focusing on commercializing autonomous trucks for long-haul applications in the U.S. In addition to its Blacksburg headquarters and engineering offices in Austin, Texas, and Montreal, Canada, Torc has a fleet operations facility in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas, to support the company’s productization and commercialization efforts, as well as a presence in Ann Arbor, MI, to leverage the autonomous and automotive talent base in that region. Torc’s purpose is driving the future of freight with autonomous technology. As the world’s leading autonomous trucking solution, we empower exceptional employees, deliver a focused, hub-to-hub autonomous truck product, and provide our customers with the safest, most reliable, and cost-efficient solution to the market.

Contacts

Laura Lawton, 408-505-5820
press@torc.ai

Torc Officially Opens First Autonomous Hub in Fort Worth, Celebrates Commercialization Era

by Kiley Thompson | May 15, 2025 | Featured, News

Torc CEO Peter Vaughn Schmidt cuts the ribbon at the official opening of the new autonomous trucking hub.

The weather forecast for the week of May 11th in Fort Worth was clear and hot, unlike the week before. The week of May 4th, the skies were darkened by massive storms, dropping almost two inches of rain in a day. On the 11th, the high temperature was 75, and on the 12th, it was 79. But on Tuesday, May 13, 2025, the day Torc cut the ribbon on its newest location – its first autonomous trucking hub – it was a sweltering 97.

Welcome to DFW, everyone said. It’s spring but summer is coming. This is just the beginning.

And they’re right. This is indeed just the beginning. After 20 years in the robotics business, and six years of software research and development, Torc officially opened the company’s first commercial hub on that hot Tuesday morning, preparing to get their self-driving trucks hauling commercial freight on the I-35 corridor.

As we embark on this next phase, we are more excited than ever to be part of this community, to innovate alongside you, and to continue our mission to Drive the Future of Freight with purpose and passion.

– Peter Vaughan Schmidt, CEO

Torc welcomed local dignitaries, government officials, first responders, partners, neighbors from Hillwood’s AllianceTexas development, and many local community members and vendors. Tours were provided through the building, highlighting Torc’s story and history, path to commercialization, job creation, and how the autonomous yard flow will work.

The Hub features a customer experience center, offices, and dedicated control centers for fleet management and operations. It is located on I-35, the major freight route between Dallas and Laredo, Texas. Laredo is the largest economic port of entry in the US, with more than 15,000 truck crossings per day and $320B in total trade in 2024, and Fort Worth is a major distribution point to the rest of the country.

The Brains of the operation

One of the stops on the tour was inside the brain of Torc’s Hub, the Mission Management room. Dominated by a movie-theater sized screen with multiple tracking visuals playing simultaneously, the Mission Management room will track the lifecycle of each autonomous mission. Guests learned about the different parts of the mission, from the rigid pre-trip checklist through to the arrival transmissions at the end of a journey. Questions asked and answered included details on job creation over the next year through to customer success models and long-term plans for additional routes.

This hub represents more than just logistics. It represents years of relentless planning and prioritization, input from industry experts, and the dedication and tireless effort of Torc’s teams. It’s the realization of a bold vision—where autonomous trucks revolutionize the freight industry by making it more efficient, cost-effective, safe and reliable.

– Andrew Culhane, CCO

Guests were able to climb into one of Torc’s new fifth generation Freightliner Cascadia autonomous trucks, and see the Flex unit inside.

Watch the ribbon cutting ceremony.

THE EMBODIMENT OF Torc's COMMERCIALIZATION ERA

In the afternoon, after the official guests had toured the facility, Torc’rs welcomed their families and friends in to see their new offices. Everyone played corn hole and giant Connect 4, and ate spicy tacos and snow cones. Our safety drivers introduced their toddlers to their colleagues. Kids and families sat in the truck cab for pictures. People fanned themselves with Torc fans and escaped back inside for the A/C. Together, everyone watched a screening of Torc’s newest video, The Road Rises, playing on Mission Management’s screen. It focuses on the people behind the technology, and celebrates the accomplishments of hundreds of individuals, working together as one Torc team.

The few remaining empty hub offices will soon be filled by new Torc’rs. It will become more bustling, even more energetic. There will be more long hours and longer days, and then it’ll become a 24-hour a day facility. But May 13th was about celebrating getting to this point. It was opening the doors.

The road to Torc’s 2027 market entry is paved with groundbreaking advancements, and a lot of that pavement is in Fort Worth and Texas now. Keep following Torc as we continue to drive the future of freight.

Today isn’t just about opening a new location for Torc — it’s about opening doors to the future.

– Peter Vaughan Schmidt