NuTonomy, the startup that beat Uber Technologies Inc. to public
streets with robot taxis, will begin trying out autonomous vehicles
in Boston by year's end.
The company, financed in part by Ford Motor Co. Executive
Chairman Bill Ford's venture fund, announced on Monday a deal with
the city of Boston and state of Massachusetts to test on public
roads a Renault Zoe electric car with nuTonomy's self-driving
software.
The Cambridge, Mass., startup is racing to roll out an
autonomous commercial fleet in Singapore in 2018, well ahead of the
time frame announced by auto makers for bringing self-driving
vehicles to market. BMW AG and Ford, for example, have targeted
2021.
"These tests in the City of Boston will enable our engineers to
adapt our autonomous vehicle software to the weather and traffic
challenges of this unique driving environment," Karl Iagnemma,
nuTonomy co-founder, said in a statement.
The tests, which initially will involve a single car, will be
conducted in the Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park, an industrial area
in the southern part of the city. Beyond exposing the self-driving
system to foul weather, they will help the company sharpen its
software's ability to recognize signage and road markings and gain
experience with the complexities of urban driving, including
pedestrians and cyclists as well as human motorists.
NuTonomy, which aims to create a fully autonomous on-demand car
service, began tests in Singapore last August. Autonomous vehicle
trials by Alphabet Inc. and Uber, which began testing a fleet in
Pittsburgh in September, have received more attention, but the
startup has attracted fans in the automotive industry, and the
Boston tests could elevate its profile.
Mr. Iagnemma and co-founder Emilio Frazzoli conceived nuTonomy's
software at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they
influenced the broader development of autonomous driving as a
principal research scientist and professor, respectively. Sterling
Anderson, who directs Tesla Motors Inc.'s semiautonomous Autopilot
system, came out of Mr. Iagnemma's MIT lab.
"The reason we're able to move quickly is because we've made a
lot of mistakes already, quite frankly. We've been in the trenches
at MIT on the research side, and we knew what didn't work and we
had a pretty good sense of what would work," Mr. Iagnemma told an
audience last week at the KPMG Automotive Executive Forum held
ahead of the L.A. Auto Show.
NuTonomy completed a $16 million Series A funding round in May
led by Highland Capital Partners that included investments from
Fontinalis Partners and Samsung Ventures. Fontinalis was founded by
Mr. Ford, great-grandson of Henry Ford, who has advocated for
self-driving technology.
Interest in automotive startups has soared since General Motors
Co.'s $1 billion deal to acquire Cruise Automation earlier this
year to jump start its self-driving efforts, followed by Uber's
acquisition of autonomous-truck startup Otto, which was co-founded
by Anthony Levandowski, one of the brains behind Google's
self-driving cars.
Google's program appears to be farthest along technically,
having driven more than 2 million miles on public roadways. The
company, however, hasn't articulated its business strategy.
Like Google's, nuTonomy's system uses a mix of sensors, lasers
and cameras to feed images and data to a computer designed to learn
to navigate streets. Similar to a teenage motorist, such systems
need to gather real-world experience to improve driving skills.
Auto makers and tech companies around the world aim to introduce
fully self-driving cars in coming years, even while questions about
performance and regulation remain unanswered. One of the challenges
for companies developing self-driving cars has been performance in
bad weather. Existing systems have had difficulty seeing in snow,
for example.
Boston should give the nuTonomy program plenty of experience
with snow, while Singapore already has provided it with experience
driving in rain.
NuTonomy picked Singapore for the testing that began in August
because of the city-state's favorable regulatory and
legal-liability environment, the company said last week.
NuTonomy, however, isn't developing its software solely for
Singapore. Mr. Iagnemma signaled the company was looking to run
tests in other cities and said it would announce locations
worldwide within months.
"Now, that doesn't mean it will be in all cities around the
world at the same time. There are a tier of markets that will see
this technology first…It's a global play," he said.
That nuTonomy picked Boston as a test bed isn't surprising,
following the city's announcement in September that it had
partnered with the World Economic Forum to conduct a yearlong
effort to create policy recommendations for autonomous cars and
support testing.
"We are focused on the future of our city and how we safely move
people around, while providing them with reliable mobility
choices," Mayor Martin Walsh said in a statement at the time.
Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 21, 2016 13:45 ET (18:45 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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