AImotive is an autonomous vehicle technology company working towards Level 5 autonomous vehicles. The company describes its approach as "vision-first", a system that primarily relies on cameras and artificial intelligence to detect its surroundings. The technology is designed to be implemented by automobile manufacturers to create fully autonomous vehicles, which can operate in all conditions and locations. In September 2017, PSA Group teamed up with AImotive.
History
The company was founded in Budapest, Hungary as AdasWorks by Laszlo Kishonti in 2015. AImotive is a spin-off of the founder's previous company, Kishonti Ltd, which was a computer hardware benchmarking company. In November 2016, the company changed its name to AImotive. The company has secured three rounds of funding. The first investment round of $2,500,000 was announced on May 15, 2015 and was led by Inventure Oy. In a second round of funding the company received $10.5 million in funding from Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Draper Associates, Nvidia, Tamares Group and others. On January 4, 2018 AImotive announced a Series C round of $38 million funded by investors B Capital Group, Prime Ventures and others. This round made AImotive the second largest Hungarian-based startup based on venture capital investment. The company first created a prototype which it tested on the Hungarian Formula 1 Grand Prix track, Hungaroring. As of January 2018, the company tests its technology on Toyota, Citroen and Volvo models. In the spring of 2017 AImotive announced it had been granted a license to test its autonomous vehicles on public roads in Finland. This announcement was followed by similar licenses in Hungary and the State of California. In December 2017 the company indicated that it had acquired a self-driving test permit in the State of Nevada. The company's headquarters have remained in Hungary, while it has expanded to the U.S. with an office in Mountain View, California. AImotive also has offices in Helsinki, Finland and Tokyo, Japan. In 2016 Nvidia confirmed it was working with AImotive and Volvo within the DriveMe project. In September 2017 AImotive and PSA Groupe announced a partnership to develop a highway autopilot. The same year AImotive announced it was developing an artificial intelligence accelerator, branded as aiWare. AImotive partnered with VeriSilicon and GlobalFoundries to create test chips of the architecture for use in its prototypes. At the Consumer Electronics Show 2018 the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center announced its DRVLINE platform in which AImotive is listed as a software technology partner.
Technology
As of December 2017, AImotive is developing three branches of technology connected to autonomous vehicles. aiDrive is a self-driving software stack. aiSim is a virtual simulation environment, and aiWare, a silicon IP for chips that compute artificial intelligence. aiDrive is a self-driving software solution that utilizes artificial intelligence and data from cameras and other secondary sensors. AImotive focuses on processing visual information, this approach is similar to that of Tesla, and some industry experts consider it risky. However, the company has successfully demonstrated its technology on US highways. The software consists of four engines: recognition, location, motion and control. The first two engines are responsible for recognizing objects around the vehicle and localizing it on a map. The motion engine plans the trajectory of the vehicle incorporating artificial intelligence. The control engine communicates commands to the car's drive-by-wire system. aiSim is a virtual simulation environment for testing autonomous vehicles. AImotive CEO, László Kishonti has stated that simulation technology has been used by the aviation industry to enhance safety effectively, and that the same technology will lead to safer self-driving cars, and also accelerate development. The hardware architecture by AImotive is a dedicated embedded artificial intelligence accelerator for computer vision with high-resolution input. The company hopes to use these chips in its prototype cars. AImotive leads the Neural Network Exchange Format working group of The Khronos Group. NNEF is a standard for exchanging artificial neural networks between inference engines. aiWare is the first hardware solution that follows the NNEF standard.
AImotive in popular media
AImotive was featured among the CB Insights 100 Promising Artificial Intelligence Startups in January 2017. The list collected startups that were "accelerating research, improving efficiency, and making many game-changing advancements that will be felt for decades to come" stated CB Insights CEO, Anand Sanwal. AImotive was featured on the British television showGuy Martin vs The Robot Car which aired on November 26, 2017. In the show British motorcycle racer and television personality, Guy Martin visits the company's headquarters and participates in a test drive on a Hungarian Motorway.
