In 2005 a group of Virginia Tech student engineers designed and built three autonomous vehicles to compete in the AUVSI Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. After three rigorous days, competing against 27 other teams, the students swept the competition placing first, second, and third - laying the foundation for Torcâs core value of Winning Teams. Later that year, the students built two other autonomous vehicles to compete in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Of the 195 applicants, the team placed eighth and ninth, completing nearly 100 combined miles of autonomous driving in the harsh rocky desert terrain. As the firm's most recent (2019) website notes, these successes generated interest across several markets including automotive, mining and defense. To commercialize the technology and keep the team together, Torc was founded in 2005. With name of the firm selected as a play on the word âtorque,â -- implying that the firm's technology controls the steering wheel to drive an autonomous vehicle - the firm located in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center with the firm enrolled in the VTKnowledgeWorks technology incubator. Organized almost from the outset to provide end-to-end self-driving software for mobility, trucking, mining, and defense markets through strategic partnerships, management was focused on enabling engineers rapidly to integrate robotic systems through a suite of modular, customizable products. The firm's Robotic Building Block products have been adopted by leading academic, commercial and government organizations to shorten the development process, lower costs and mitigate risks with TORC's products having been used on over a hundred mobile robots ranging from 15 pounds to 15 tons. Providing solutions for drive-by-wire conversion, emergency stop, power management, autonomous navigation, and operator control, the firm's ByWire XGV, a drive-by-wire Hybrid Escape with integrated SafeStop safety and PowerHub distribution systems, provides an integration-ready base platform for autonomous system. Having grown to a fairly good sized small firm, in late March 2019, it was announced that Torc Robotics had been acquired by Daimler Trucks North Ame
