Deep tech startup Minus Zero unveils autopilot for India
India based Deep tech startup Minus Zero said it has unveiled an end-to-end autopilot system 'for the first time in India' enabling navigation in dense Indian urban traffic with on-coming vehicles and narrow roads with or without lane markings.
'Tested on some of the challenging streets of Bengaluru, our vision-based system can gracefully handle unique obstacles like animals, push-karts, small two-wheelers (Yulu), etc. and their unpredictable behaviours,' the startup said in a statement.
To enable such features in unstructured traffic, the company said it has taken an AI-first approach by training end-to-end foundational models that can learn navigation in self-supervised manner from large scale raw data without human labels, instead of traditionally used rule-based systems.
'With the sudden explosion of ADAS (specifically L1 & L2) systems in India over the last few years, we believe it's the right time to shift to even more advanced levels like L2+, L2++ & L3,' it said.
'Today Indian consumers are ready for more technology-rich features at a marginal increase in the price point and experience the luxury, the safety and the comfort that comes with it,' it added.
While there are several working L2+ & L3 systems in developed countries like Tesla's FSD, Mercedes' Drive Pilot, GM's Super Cruise, BYD's God's Eye, enabling such autopilot systems in an unstructured traffic environment like India & other emerging countries has been a very challenging task.
While 90% of the ADAS products are deployed in few developed countries, 85% of road accidents of the world come from emerging countries, with much more need for such advanced driving assistance systems, the firm said.
'At Minus Zero, we understand this unique pain point and technology shift required for building advanced autopilot systems for all the major emerging countries (starting with India),' it said.
Having shown India's first fully driverless vehicle for in-campus mobility, the firm said it has now embark on its next leap of journey with a full-stack autopilot system for Indian traffic.
'Our autopilot system leverages power of bespoke foundational models and self supervised learning to navigate some highly complicated scenarios (as seen in the video) using only cameras, and without reliance on HD Maps,' the firm said.
'This is also the first time when end-to-end foundational models are being tested on Indian roads,' it said.
Minus Zero is already working with a couple of large OEMs in their journey to upgrade them to these solutions and is in talks with others for the same.
'While we are still developing & validating the entire system, we aim to be ready for production in the next 2 years alongside our OEM partners,' it said.
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