Hello everyone, I’m Shinpei Kato, the chairman of the Board of Directors.

Hope you are all safe and refreshed through Christmas and New Year holidays.

It has been two years since the AWF started. Last month we had an excellent online General Assembly back in Dec 2020 with almost all members joining. We have reviewed the progress made in the last period and discussed our priorities going forward. On behalf of the board, I appreciate all of your contributions to the AWF. We are growing at a rapid pace as a popular open-source initiative for autonomous driving. There is still a long way to go, but little doubt that I have that we will be able to offer the market with a very credible open-source approach to autonomous vehicles.

This year we start with the new Board of Directors, expanding our potential and capability to push Autoware to the next level. We are committed to a transparent management and drive an aggressive yet practical development plan along with our mission and vision.

Quotes from the new board of directors;

I wish all the members a healthy and happy new year. Differing in background and market position, we come together believing in pushing the boundary and accelerating innovation in autonomous driving with open source. We choose to join forces to explore rather than plodding through alone. Through collaborative engineering, I am confident that we would be making essential contributions in accelerating the development of various technologies which in turn makes autonomous driving a reality, at scale. We hope to do this, first and foremost, by delivering tangible value to member companies who support and contribute to our collective cause.

Yang Zhang, co-founder of the Autoware Foundation

I believe anything is possible when we work together. Which is why ADLINK is deeply committed to open source. I see that in 2021 all of us together will take Autoware Foundation to a new level of capabilities by different contributions from all aspects. Let’s seize this opportunity of the coming era of autonomous vehicles and change the world. Wish you all have a healthy and happy new year!

Jim Liu, CEO, ADLINK

Happy new year to all. As Arm accelerates it’s development of autonomous compute technologies, it is critical for us to create a strong ecosystem of open source autonomous solutions that drive innovation with a path to productization. We believe that Autoware plays a key role in enabling critical functionality in the autonomy stack and we are very excited to join the board to contribute to it’s growth and adoption

Girish Shirasat, Director for Software Strategy/Architecture, Arm

The efforts of the Autoware Foundation have already had an incredible impact on advances in autonomy and has the momentum and support to do much more and to continue to be one of the most successful open source projects in history. No one company can successfully deploy autonomous technology to production by itself. An ecosystem of amazing partners must come together to do so. The Autoware Foundation will continue to significantly lower these challenging barriers, allowing more technology to add value to the world soon, rather than later. I’m thrilled to bring the power of Hexagon into the Autoware Foundation to ensure the mission is achieved. This is just the beginning.

Bobby Hambrick, Chief Autonomy Officer/Autonomy and Positioning Division, Hexagon Thank you for loving Autoware and wish you all the best,

Shinpei Kato