Elm Company, the leading Saudi technology provider of outstanding digital solutions aimed at fast-tracking the transformation to smart economies across 15+ major sectors to help maximize benefits and outcomes while making lives easier, joined the Autoware Foundation!

In line with Elm’s commitment towards research and innovation focusing on client challenges, Elm is expanding its activity in the UK to access top talents and leverage the strong ecosystem with a new program to develop and deliver autonomous mobility solutions in urban-like geofenced areas for people and goods transportation. Their objective is to develop the software and algorithms enabling autonomous driving capabilities and deliver them as part of end-to-end smart mobility solutions designed for use cases relying on robust localization and perception with advanced autonomous navigation, particularly tailored for the Middle East environments. Elm wants to leverage its experience in R&D, the industry maturity, the recent breakthroughs in AI, the ecosystem, and its partners to deliver its vision of smart and sustainable mobility.

Having assessed the different open-source autonomous driving software platforms, Elm concluded that Autoware is the most advanced and the best maintained. What Autoware’s Open AD Kit envisions and its underlying microservices-based architecture fits especially well with Elm’s target architecture. With this joining, Elm has become the first organization from the GCC region to join the Autoware Foundation.

Elm already started investing in the autonomous driving sector and has built a strong team of experts to drive autonomous driving-related activities. Elm Autonomous Mobility team has extensive experience in research and industry in designing, developing, and delivering autonomous vehicles deployed worldwide. The team gathers various core competencies such as software engineering, generative AI, robotics, and automotive engineering.

Elm intends to take an active role in Autoware technical working groups and interact with other community members to expand further and improve Autoware’s autonomous driving capabilities. Additionally, Elm plans to share learnings from testing Autoware modules in challenging environmental conditions, such as sand/dust storms and high temperatures that are common in Saudi Arabia.