Three weeks ago, Po-Jen Wang, a software engineer at Autoware Foundation, joined the ROS By-the-Bay meetup, the exclusive Bay area meetup for ROS enthusiasts.

Po-Jen’s talk was titled “AV4EV – Open-source AV software for open-standard EV platforms”. To get to the bottom of the message, Po-Jen discussed how the EV revolution in automotive is playing out and how this is connected to software-defined vehicles.

Essentially, what’s important is to have an EV platform that can be converted into an AV to research autonomous driving. Autoware Centers of Excellence has a solution for this.

Our Centers of Excellence initiative is headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn CoE) and spread to more than 20 universities across three continents. Through this center, the Autoware Foundation has an excellent reach to academic communities, state funding schemes, and key talent to work on the Autoware-related projects.

The UPenn CoE team has been working on integrating the Autoware project with two vehicle platforms so far:

• F1Tenth platform (1/10 scale)
• AV4EV go-kart platform (1/2 scale) 🏁🚀

Autoware Foundation has very close ties to F1Tenth Foundation, and yesterday, a big F1Tenth race took place during the IROS 2023 conference in Detroit, USA.

We will soon share more information on the AV4EV go-kart platform, an open-source HW/SW platform tailored for autonomous vehicle research and development.

Autoware is widely used for autonomous vehicle research, development, and deployment. It has been used for over 30 vehicle types and in more than 500 companies in more than 20 countries.

Here are some photos from the event: