The Autoware Foundation ecosystem is getting stronger with the addition of new members with deep expertise in autonomous vehicle technology!

A leading autonomous driving startup, Driveblocks, has joined the Autoware Foundation!

Driveblocks is a startup out of Munich, Germany, founded by automotive industry veterans and autonomous racing pioneers with a proven track record in getting autonomous driving technology on the roads and testing the limits of autonomy on the race tracks. Driveblocks team met at the Technical University of Munich, where they participated in the Indy Autonomous Challenge races, and they emerged victorious at Indianapolis Motor Speedway race, achieving overtaking maneuvers at blazing speeds of 265 km per hour.

Driveblocks’s core technology combines various AI algorithms to create a local environment model based on sensor data. This is in contrast to needing HD maps where the vehicle operates, which is expensive to build and maintain over time. Driveblocks’ modular software architecture conveniently resembles Autoware’s modular software architecture, allowing the integration of Driveblocks’ technology into Autoware software.

The Driveblocks team plans to join the Sensing & Perception and Mapping & Localization working groups. With their deep expertise in deep learning, camera and LiDAR-based perception, and sensor fusion, they offer interface definitions and implementations to enable Autoware software to leverage mapless autonomous driving. Besides that, the Driveblocks team will work closely with the working groups to improve the modularity of the relevant autonomy stacks (e.g., sensing, perception) to unlock the possibility of third-party vendors offering other perception and sensor fusion solutions.

Driveblocks team underscores the importance of open source, especially during early commercialization stages, for setting up a de facto industry standard for different players to collaborate and for startups to focus on their core competencies and differentiated value offerings while reusing, nurturing, and consuming collective experience within the open source community for other parts of the projects.

We welcome Driveblocks to the Autoware Foundation and are excited to work with a partner with excellent experience in developing cutting-edge autonomous driving algorithms and autonomous solutions backed by years of experience in research, development, and deployment of autonomous solutions.

Visit Driveblocks’ web page > https://www.driveblocks.ai/

Take a look at Driveblocks’ Autoware I/O page > https://autoware.org/autowareio/driveblocks/