driveblocks is a company founded and operated by the 2021 winners of Indy Autonomous Challenge. They specialize in developing a Mapless Autonomy Platform that enables heavy-duty vehicles to detect objects and perceive their surroundings without relying on high-definition maps. Their technology has applications in container terminals, mining, agriculture, and hub-to-hub logistics, unlocking cost-saving potentials, safety improvements, and more efficient workflows.

driveblocks

driveblocks, a start-up based in Garching near Munich, offers a modular software platform for automated and autonomous driving in the commercial vehicle sector. The founding team looks back on many years of experience in the research and development of algorithms for automated driving and has already successfully participated in several research competitions, including the Indy Autonomous Challenge, in the USA. 

The core technology is a combination of different AI algorithms to create a local environment model based on sensor data. In contrast to existing technologies based on so-called high-definition maps, this eliminates the need for costly pre-mapping and constant updating of these maps in the cloud. The offering is complemented by other compatible algorithms, enabling customers to fully automate their vehicles. 

The driveblocks software platform is sold both in individual modules and as a system solution via a licensing model and can be operated in various application areas, for example in mines, container terminals and on the highway. 


📢 Kicking off the new year with the 2024.01 software release 🚀

For the past months, our development team has brought some great additions and enhancements into the Mapless Autonomy Platform: 

✅ focused on making our perception and sensor-fusion software more resource efficient to improve its suitability for deployment on resource constrained embedded devices
✅ support for multi-task learning to make the neural networks more data efficient and generalizable
✅ various minor fixes of bugs occuring after long run times of the software 

Want to learn how the latest release can accelerate your way to autonomy in agriculture, mining, or highway trucking? Reach out to us! 

#mapless #autonomousvehicles #autonomoustrucking 

Next stop for our team: Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley 🚀

We are participating in the US Market Entry Program by German Accelerator to expand our reach within the American market. Right after #CES2024, its a great next step to have boots on the ground and plan out our international growth journey.  

Let us know if you want to meet with our co-founders Dr. Stephan Matz and Alexander Wischnewski in the Bay Area - we are happy to discuss our mapless approach to commercial vehicle autonomy and all things autonomous driving 🚜🚚

#mapless #autonomousvehicles #autonomoustrucking 

Wrapping up an eventful 2023 - it has been packed with important milestones for us and we look forward to the exciting things the upcoming year will bring 🤩

What did 2023 had in store for us? 

🚀 We could expand our partnerships with key players in the autonomous driving industry, such as Apex.AI and Seyond (formerly Innovusion), showcasing that a software-defined vehicle ecosystem is a core building block for making fully autonomous vehicles possible. 

🚀 Continuing our relationship with existing customers and adding new customers and development partners, such as the japanese deep-tech specialist TIER IV. 

🚀 Securing our 2.2M€ Seed-Round co-led by Rethink Ventures and Bayern Kapital, joined by our previous investors Friedrich & Wagner Holding and angel investor Joachim Drees. 

🚀 Benchmarking the Mapless Autonomy Platform with real world data from highways around europe, including the Brenner Pass. In addition, we had the chance to showcase it's capabilities with partners and customers in various other applications such as logistics, mining, and agriculture. 

🚀 Winning the VDE Bayern award in the Startup category - for our innovative perception and sensor-fusion for mapless autonomous driving. 

🚀 Finally - we had the chance to foster our relation with the autonomous driving community by hosting the AD Meetup together with in-tech GmbH at our previous office location in Garching. Starting from January - our new headquarter will be at WERK1 – the most startup-friendly place in Munich! 

Thanks to all partners, customers, investors, and friends who have been part of the journey already and are now moving forward with us to 2024! We are going to take a short break and will be kicking of the new year in January with a visit to CES in #LasVegas! 

#mapless #autonomousdriving #autonomoustrucking  

There are still many things ahead of us in autonomous driving - thats why we believe that constant exchange with research and industry players is vital to achieve sustainable and safe progress for the technology 🚀

in-tech GmbH and driveblocks took the chance to foster this exchange and hosted the widely known Autonomous Driving Meetup in Munich, inviting students, researchs, developers and industry veterans for an evening event with three presentations. 

🚚 Alexander Wischnewski kicked off the event with insights on our Mapless Autonomy Platform, how we leverage transformer neural network architectures for increased robustness and combine this with explainable sensor-fusion to move forward with certification. 

🚚 Antonio M. López gave insights into his labs computer vision research of the past year and sparked some insightful conversations on the future use of simulation to boost the development of autonomous vehicles via transfer learning and automated labeling. 

🚚 Mirko Maehlisch concluded the evening with an on-point assessment of whats going on in the race to full autonomy in the automotive sector, making a strong argument for required breakthroughs in the area of simulation technology to replace large data collection fleets with a more scalable approach. 

Thanks for everyone who took part in the event - to the organizers Felix Friedmann and Florian Netter, and to the team pulling everything off around the event and behind the scenes 🚀 Laura Winter✨, Lars Funke, Henri Höchter, Tim Stahl, Thomas Herrmann, Felix Nobis, Dr. Stephan Matz.

The next autonomous driving meetup in Munich is around the corner! 

Join us for an evening packed with technical talks: 

🚀 Introduction & Welcome
🚀 Transformer NNs & Explainable Sensor-fusion for Robust Perception - Alexander Wischnewski 
🚀 Simulation for Semantic Self-labeling & Self-driving - Antonio M. López 
🚀 The superposition state of autonomous driving: simultaneously ready and not ready - Mirko Maehlisch 

and finally we are going to wrap up the evening with drinks and snacks! 

Thanks to Felix Friedmann and Florian Netter for the organization - you can signup here: https://lnkd.in/deFtZ4TX

#mapless #autonomousdriving #autonomoustrucking

AI:DRIVEBLOCKS

driveblocks