Roadstar.ai Selects Renovo's AWare OS for its Autonomous Driving System

Roadstar.ai, a Silicon Valley and China-based startup developing level-4 autonomous technology, announced today it has selected Renovo's AWare, a production-grade operating system (OS) for self-driving cars. Roadstar.ai will build its autonomous technology using Renovo's OS.

Renovo is another promising Silicon Valley startup developing an OS for autonomous mobility. The company says its AWare OS will be the critical layer needed to bring autonomous vehicles to market at scale.  AWare is designed as a development and commercialization platform for autonomous vehicles, allowing third party developers to build applications that will run on it.

Renovo OS handles low-level, or infrastructure layer of safety and security systems on a autonomous vehicle, so its partners like Roadstar.ai can focus on the upper layer, which contains the self-driving code to operate the vehicle.

As part of the deal, Roadstar.ai gains access to the ecosystem of AWare-compatible vehicles, sensors, and other third-party technologies and services that interact with its automated driving system (ADS). AWare allows Roadstar.ai to concentrate on building its core autonomous driving technologies and services across a wide range of vehicles.

"Roadstar.ai is a pioneering creator of full stack Level 4 automated driving technology, and we are delighted they have selected AWare as a development and production platform," said Chris Heiser, Renovo CEO and Co-Founder. "Roadstar.ai and Renovo share a common focus on taking automated mobility to scale in a safe and economical manner as quickly as possible."

Renovo's AWare OS is the first operating system built specifically for automated mobility. The OS provides interfaces for self-driving software to help speed development and deployment of autonomous fleets.

One of Renovo's Chrysler Pacifica minivan outfitted with self-driving technology

Roadstar.ai  was founded in 2017 by three engineers who had previously led autonomous driving technologies at Google, Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, and Baidu USA.

Roadstar.ai's first AWare-powered vehicle model is the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan, the same model used by Waymo for its upcoming commercial self-driving ride-hailing service.

"Roadstar.ai's mission is to enable fully autonomous robo-taxi services for an intelligent, efficient and safe mobility experience," said Dr. Xianqiao Tong, founder and CEO of Roadstar.ai. "We selected Renovo's AWare OS for development and as a commercialization platform because of its technical capabilities, the company's focus on deployment at scale, access to the AWare ecosystem and as a go-to-market path for our ADS with North American and European fleet operators."

The Renovo AWare OS provides a vehicle-independent abstraction layer (API) that allows developers of commercial autonomous cars or automated mobility services to write applications that can be deployed at scale.

Renovo says that its AWare OS is robust enough to run today's most demanding automated driving systems (ADS) as well as the safety and security features required for automotive validation.

Roadstar.ai already achieved several leading benchmarks in the industry. It won the 1st place of the computer vision benchmark at Cityscapes dataset and ranked top 3 in KITTI 3D detection dataset.

Roadstar.ai team is an impressive roster of talent that includes former engineers who worked on self-driving cars at Google, Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, and Baidu USA.

Roadstar.ai has been testing its automated vehicle technology in Shenzhen, China. The company was also granted a autonomous vehicle testing permit to test driverless cars on public roads in California.

Roadstar.ai is just the latest company to join the AWare ecosystem. Others include, Velodyne, one of the leading companies supplying lidar, an important component for driverless cars, Silicon Valley-based Voyage, Phantom Auto, and Metamoto, as well as HD mapping company HERE Technologies and Verizon.

Roadstar.ai was named best AI Startup and best overall Startup at CES Asia in 2018.

In May 2018, Roadstar.ai announced it had raised $128M in series A financing to support and accelerate the development and deployment of its automated driving technology.