Leo Drive and The Autoware Foundation

We’ve been accepted to be an industry member of the Autoware Foundation on December 8, 2020. What Autoware Foundation is explained best on its official website: “The Autoware Foundation is a non-profit organization supporting open-source projects enabling self-driving mobility. The Autoware Foundation creates synergies between corporate development and academic research, enabling autonomous driving technology for everyone.” It’s been almost 6 months of very active participation in the ecosystem. While not only addressing the issue fixes and work on feature requests; the Leo Drive team also joined the working groups very consistently.

Although we’re participating in this popular ecosystem for the last 6 months officially, we’ve already been working on the platform, reusing development strategy, and building autonomous systems with Autoware for almost the last 3 years.

As a company, we are supporting our existing and potential customers and partners in their autonomous vehicle journey. Our strategy is not to over-engineer one specific solution and offer this to the broad autonomous vehicle market. We believe vehicle autonomy can address a lot of applications in a lot of markets, where the industries are actually suffering from the lack of autonomy.

Thus we believe, autonomous vehicle development should be somewhat open-source spirited. Black-box solutions with hyper-inflated promises are not helping our domain (take a look at the failure to commit and deliver in the past with many proprietary autonomous vehicle solutions). On the other hand, open-source projects do help our domain. They bring transparency and act as a very firm anchor to propagate the idea of how to build autonomous vehicles.

As of the 2nd of June 2021, our membership status at the Autoware Foundation was elevated to the premium category to augment our dedication and commitment to contribute to the ecosystem. With this upgrade, we will also start tackling the obstacles in the strategic agenda for a better and more prosperous ecosystem.

I urge every company that is working on the autonomous vehicle landscape to take a look at and contribute to the Autoware Foundation.