Widespread adoption of self-driving EVs faces several significant barriers including social acceptance, safety and regulatory restrictions. But according to a new report from CoBank, another major challenge that is often overlooked is the monumental impact these vehicles will have on the data center market. While technology developments such as efficient... Read more →
Jaguar Land Rover has formed a multi-year strategic partnership with NVIDIA to develop jointly and to deliver next-generation automated driving systems plus AI-enabled services and experiences for its customers. Starting in 2025, all new Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles will be built on the NVIDIA DRIVE software-defined platform, delivering a... Read more →
Korea-based MORAI, a developer of full-stack autonomous vehicle simulation technology, secured a US$20-million Series B funding round. The round includes investment from new investors Korea Investment Partners, KB Investment, and the state-run Korea Development Bank (KDB), as well as from existing investors Naver’s D2 Startup Factory, Hyundai Motor Group’s ZERO1NE,... Read more →
Toyota Research Institute (TRI) researchers have successfully programmed a vehicle to drift autonomously around obstacles on a closed track—a world first. Combining a deep knowledge of both vehicle dynamics and control design, TRI’s Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) approach extends the vehicle’s operational domain to the very limits of its... Read more →
Elroy Air, a company developing the first end-to-end autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aerial cargo system, unveiled its pre-production Chaparral aircraft. The Chaparral can autonomously pick up 300-500 lbs of cargo and deliver it by air up to 300 miles, a capability that pushes beyond the limited payload capabilities... Read more →
The Automated Bus Consortium, a collective of US transit agencies and departments of transportation, released a request for proposals (RFP) to procure up to seventy full-size Level 4 automated buses. “Level 4” is a designation of highly automated vehicles as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). Level 4... Read more →
The exploration of airborne transportation and advanced air mobility (AAM) is the focus of a new partnership between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Supernal—an advanced air mobility company from Hyundai Motor Group (earlier post). Supernal is developing electric, autonomous air vehicles capable of accommodating four to five passengers... Read more →
Baidu’s intelligent electric vehicle arm JIDU has closed Series A financing, raising nearly $400 million. This round of financing was backed by Baidu and its strategic partner multinational auto manufacturer Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. JIDU’s first Robocar concept car will be unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show in April this... Read more →
Bosch and the Volkswagen Group subsidiary Cariad have agreed to form an extensive partnership to accelerate the introduction of automated driving functions across all vehicle classes. The companies want to make partially and highly automated driving suitable for volume production, and thus available to the broad mass of consumers. For... Read more →
Wisk, a leading Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) company and developer of the first all-electric, self-flying air taxi in the US, has secured $450 million in funding from The Boeing Company, making it one of the most well-funded AAM companies in the world. Combined with previous funding, this investment reinforces Wisk’s... Read more →
Autonomous driving technology company Pony.ai has introduced its 6th generation autonomous driving (AD) system, with leading-edge sensors, NVIDIA DRIVE computing platform solutions, and styling and design features for L4 automotive-grade mass production fleets. The first model equipped with this system, Toyota S-AM, a seven-seat hybrid electric platform for autonomous mobility... Read more →
Parallel Systems, a company founded by former SpaceX engineers to reimagine the railroad system, has raised $49.55 million in Series A funds to build autonomous battery-electric rail vehicles that move freight. The round is led by Anthos Capital, and includes investments from Congruent Ventures, Riot Ventures, Embark Ventures, and others.... Read more →
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is developing a new ratings program that evaluates the safeguards that vehicles with partial automation employ to help drivers stay focused on the road. The safeguards will be rated “good”, “acceptable”, “marginal” or “poor”. To earn a good rating, systems will need to... Read more →
Mercedes-Benz and Luminar Technologies announced a partnership to accelerate development of future automated driving technologies for passenger cars. A central component of this is the optimal access to new technologies and global competencies. The intent of this partnership is to leverage the foundational lidar technology from Luminar with the aim... Read more →
J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc., one of the largest supply chain solutions providers in North America, announced a long-term, strategic alliance with Waymo Via that will advance efforts to integrate commercial autonomous driving technology in transportation and logistics, with ultimate plans to complete fully autonomous transport in Texas in the... Read more →
Nuro has introduced its third-generation electric autonomous delivery vehicle. This new vehicle improves on the previous design and is ready to be produced at scale, the company said. The new vehicle is approximately 20% smaller in width than average passenger cars, giving bicyclists and pedestrians more room to maneuver alongside... Read more →
GILLIG and RR.AI, a developer of autonomous mobility solutions, have entered into a development agreement for next-generation advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and SAE Level 4 autonomous vehicle (AV) technology for GILLIG transit buses in North America. This partnership will combine RR.AI’s vehicle automation experience and GILLIG’s transit operations expertise... Read more →
Autonomous driving technology company Pony.ai recently formed a joint venture with Sinotrans, part of China Merchants Group and one of China’s leading logistics and freight forwarding companies. The two companies will work together to build a smart logistics network featuring autonomous driving trucking technologies. PonyTron and Sinotrans self-driving truck The... Read more →
Avikus, Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) Group’s subsidiary specializing in autonomous navigation technologies for ships, is partnering with the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) to collaborate on real-life trials of autonomous ship technologies. As a member of the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS), ABS is a maritime classification society that... Read more →
GM’s next-generation hands-free driver assist system, Ultra Cruise, will be powered by a scalable compute architecture featuring system-on-chips developed by Qualcomm Technologies. GM will be the first company to use the Qualcomm Technologies’ Snapdragon Ride Platform for advanced driver assistance technology, which features an industry-leading 5-nanometer Snapdragon SA8540P SoC and... Read more →
Volvo Cars will introduce its unsupervised autonomous driving feature Ride Pilot to customers in the state of California first. By building on an industry-leading safety standard that will feature in Volvo Cars’ next generation of pure electric cars, Ride Pilot aims to free up more time for customers and make... Read more →
Ambarella, an AI vision silicon company, announced the CV3 AI domain controller family at CES. This fully scalable, power-efficient CVflow family of SoCs provides the automotive industry’s highest AI processing performance, at up to 500 eTOPS, representing a 42x increase over Ambarella’s prior automotive family. Featuring up to 16 Arm... Read more →
TuSimple, a global autonomous driving technology company, successfully completed the first fully autonomous semi-truck run on open public roads without a human in the vehicle and without human intervention. The run took place on 22 December and required TuSimple’s upfitted autonomous semi-truck to begin its journey from a large railyard... Read more →
Waymo is collaborating with Geely to integrate the Waymo Driver into a version of the new mobility-focused, all-electric Zeekr vehicle, designed in Sweden specially for autonomous ride-hailing (earlier post). The rider-first vehicle features a flat floor for more accessible entry, easy ingress and egress due to a B-pillarless design, low... Read more →
MORAI, a developer of full-stack autonomous driving simulation technology, will unveil MORAI SIM Cloud, which uses the cloud to build a myriad of simulation environments without hardware restrictions and enable simultaneous testing, at CES 2022. MORAI SIM Cloud is the Software as a Service (SaaS) model of the existing MORAI... Read more →
RoboSense (Suteng Innovation Technology Co., Ltd.), a developer of smart LiDAR system technology, announced a strategic investment agreement and a strategic cooperation framework agreement with BYD. RoboSense’s technology portfolio comprises LiDAR sensors, AI algorithms and IC chipsets. RoboSense says that it will keep pace with BYD, continuously upgrade its technology... Read more →
Chin-based EV maker NIO recently unveiled its fifth mass-production model, the ET5 (earlier post). The mid-size sedan’s AI features are powered by the NIO Adam supercomputer, built on four NVIDIA DRIVE Orin systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), achieving a total of more than 1,000 TOPS of performance. In addition to centralized compute, the... Read more →
NASA has selected four university-led teams for potential awards in the agency’s University Leadership Initiative (ULI) that will have them spend up to five years exploring novel ideas for improving aviation, including eliminating emissions and autonomy research in support of Advanced Air Mobility. Three of the four teams are working... Read more →
Plus (formerly Plus.ai), a global provider of self-driving truck technology, will collaborate with Teledyne FLIR on a development project to explore the addition of thermal cameras to the sensor stack used with Plus’s Level 4 autonomous driving technology. Plus takes a multi-modal sensor approach and currently uses lidar, cameras, and... Read more →
NXP Semiconductors, a leading automotive semiconductor company, has announced a strategic partnership with Foxconn Industrial Internet (FII), a subsidiary of Hon Hai, to transform the car into the ultimate edge device. NXP will provide FII with its comprehensive portfolio of automotive technologies. The initial phase of the joint project will... Read more →
Samsung Electronics unveiled an extensive lineup of automotive memory solutions designed for next-generation autonomous electric vehicles. The new lineup includes a 256-gigabyte (GB) PCIe Gen3 NVMe ball grid array (BGA) SSD, 2GB GDDR6 DRAM and 2GB DDR4 DRAM for high-performance infotainment systems, as well as 2GB GDDR6 DRAM and 128GB... Read more →
IBM and Samsung Electronics jointly announced a breakthrough in semiconductor design utilizing a new vertical transistor architecture (VTFET) that demonstrates a path to scaling beyond nanosheet, and has the potential to reduce energy usage by 85% compared to a scaled fin field-effect transistor (finFET). VTFET Vertical Transport Nanosheet Field Effect... Read more →
In July, the BMW Group, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), called on the global quantum computing community to develop innovative quantum algorithms for four specific industrial challenges and to test them on real quantum computing technologies. One winning team has now been selected for each of the... Read more →
Robotic Research, a leading developer of autonomous mobility and robotics solutions, today announced a $228-million funding round—the first outside capital the company has raised. This funding will drive further innovation and expansion of Robotic Research’s commercial division, RR.AI, which is focused on delivering comprehensive autonomous driving solutions for commercial truck,... Read more →
Mercedes-Benz is the first automotive company to meet the demanding legal requirements of UN-R157 for a Level 3 system for conditionally automated driving. The German Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) has granted system approval for this on the basis of the technical approval regulation UN-R157 (UN Regulation No. 157 -... Read more →
In collaboration with Nuro, a robotics company transforming local commerce with autonomous vehicles, 7-Eleven is launching the first autonomous commercial delivery in the state of California, enabling its customers in the Mountain View, California service area to order through the 7NOW delivery app to have their products delivered via bot.... Read more →
The Toyota Mobility Foundation (TMF), Energy Systems Network (ESN), the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) and the City of Fishers have joined with May Mobility, a leader in autonomous vehicle (AV) technology and shuttle operations, to inaugurate a free, public autonomous shuttle service on 20 December 2021 to serve the... Read more →
While the automotive industry continues to move toward fully automated, self-driving vehicles, the pace is not being matched by educational efforts that will help bring buyers into the modern mobility movement. According to the newly released J.D. Power 2021 Mobility Confidence Index (MCI) Study, consumers possess inaccurate knowledge of fully... Read more →
Steel E-Motive, an initiative of WorldAutoSteel, the automotive group of the World Steel Association and its engineering partner Ricardo unveiled the exterior styling vision for their fully autonomous ride-hailing, ride-sharing vehicle designed to showcase the benefits of using steel for global mobility-as-a-service. The Steel E-Motive vehicle design has been optimized... Read more →
Pony.ai has received approval to run paid autonomous Robotaxi services in the Beijing Intelligent Networked Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone in southeastern Beijing. With this approval, Pony.ai will be permitted to charge fees for Robotaxi services provided to the public. This represents a significant milestone on the company’s path to commercialization,... Read more →
A new report from Juniper Research has found that the automotive sensors market will grow to more than $92 billion by 2026—a 30% increase over 2021. This growth will be driven by sensors that enable automated vehicles and ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). Sensors monitoring various vehicle safety parameters in... Read more →
Baidu, Inc., JiDU Automotive and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced that JiDU’s first production vehicle will feature an intelligent digital cockpit system assisted by Baidu and Qualcomm Technologies. This system is based on the 4th Generation Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform from Qualcomm Technologies, together with the next generation intelligent cockpit system... Read more →
Electric automaker Xpeng took the wraps off the G9 SUV this week at the international Auto Guangzhou show in China (earlier post). The intelligent, software-defined vehicle is built on the high-performance compute of NVIDIA DRIVE Orin and delivers AI capabilities that are continuously upgraded with each over-the-air update. The new... Read more →
Yara Birkeland (earlier post)—the world’s first battery- electric container ship, prepared for autonomous operation—has departed for its maiden voyage in the Oslo fjord. The autonomous ship will sail within 12 nautical miles from the coast, between 3 ports in southern Norway. We are proud to be able to showcase the... Read more →
During the EnRicH 2021 European Robotics Hackathon, Southwest Research Institute’s unmanned aircraft system (UAS) explored and mapped the interior of a nuclear power plant, detecting radiation sources, autonomously without the aid of a human pilot. SwRI’s UAS, or drone, technology can potentially assist in life-saving search-and-rescue missions and hazardous inspections... Read more →
Honda and Black & Veatch have successfully tested the prototype Honda Autonomous Work Vehicle (AWV) at a Black & Veatch construction site in New Mexico. During the month-long field test, the second-generation prototype of the fully-electric Honda AWV performed a range of functions at a large-scale solar energy construction project,... Read more →
REE Automotive revealed its autonomous concept vehicle Leopard, based on a new ultra-modular EV platform design. The full-scale concept is geared for customers including last-mile autonomous and electric delivery companies, delivery fleet operators, e-retailers and technology companies seeking to build fully autonomous solutions. Fully-autonomous delivery fleets ‘Powered by REE’ will... Read more →
Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) is launching a new company called Supernal, LLC to take its future mobility vision forward. An evolution of HMG’s Urban Air Mobility Division, Supernal is developing a family of electric air vehicles and convening public and private stakeholders to shape the emerging Advanced Air Mobility (AAM)... Read more →
Neural Propulsion Systems (NPS), a developer of autonomous sensing platforms, announced that Dr. Lawrence Burns is joining as an Executive Advisor. Dr. Burns is the former Corporate Vice President of Research & Development and Planning at General Motors (earlier post). He has also advised numerous companies—including Google Self-Driving Cars/Waymo for... Read more →
Michigan State University introduced an electric autonomous bus that will serve students, staff and faculty beginning early 2022 as part of the campus’ smart mobility ecosystem. The bus represents one of the largest electric autonomous transit vehicles to be deployed on US roadways to date. Through its collaboration with the... Read more →