Key alliance agreement will advance the autonomous vehicle industry by reducing duplication and establishing benchmarks

SAN JOSE, CA FEBRUARY 8, 2022 – The Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC), a global collaboration of automotive and technology industry leaders focused on automated and assisted driving compute solutions, today announced a key alliance agreement with The Autoware Foundation, a non-profit organization that builds bridges between corporate R&D and academic research creating powerful synergy in the development of viable autonomous driving technology. The organizations’ shared goal is to help expedite the development of autonomous and assisted driving solutions through shared design benchmarks, recommendations, and marketing initiatives.

“Autoware’s open-source software is becoming a key building block in the development of autonomous driving. With the Autoware Open AD Kit, we were able to establish standardization across software stacks that enable vehicle developers to efficiently build on the accumulated body of knowledge of the entire sector,” said Shinpei Kato, Chairman, Board of Directors of the Autoware Foundation. “With their third technical report on Benchmarking Deep Neural Networks, AVCC demonstrated that the missions of AVCC and Autoware are strikingly aligned, and we are pleased to be advancing the autonomous driving industry together.”

The primary purpose of AVCC is to develop a conceptual compute platform architecture, as well as specify hardware requirements and software APls to build driving automation systems. Both organizations see great industry benefit from harmonizing related work and forging cooperation around the mutual goals of influencing innovation and promoting the development of technology standards and benchmarks in respective areas of interest. 

Autoware and AVCC recognize the importance of establishing this relationship and fostering cooperation in a number of ways including:

  • Reducing duplication and competing specifications by harmonizing work around functional safety, security, industry terminology and reports
  • Establishing ongoing information exchange to ensure close synchronization in areas of joint collaboration and industry activities 
  • Developing joint marketing initiatives, such as podcasts, webinars and virtual events around topics of shared interest such as benchmarking, image processing, system architecture models, etc.

“For the industry to move forward, we need to communicate and cooperate with others in this space,” shared Armando Pereira, President of AVCC. “Our work with The Autoware Foundation will reduce duplication in the AV space as well as provide the benchmarks and roadmap necessary to efficiently engineer autonomous vehicles.” 

For more information about each of the organizations, including how to become a member, please visit AVCC and Autoware.

About AVCC

The Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC) is a global nonprofit group of automotive and technology industry leaders coming together to help accelerate mass production of safe and affordable vehicles with assisted driving and autonomous compute technology (levels 1-5). This computing platform will be designed specifically to move today’s AV prototype systems to deployment at scale. The group collaborates to develop requirements for the compute platform architecture, its hardware requirements, and software APIs for each building block in autonomous vehicle systems. www.avcc.org 

About Autoware

Autoware is the world’s first “all-in-one” open-source software for self-driving vehicles hosted under the Autoware Foundation. Autoware.Auto is a next generation of Autoware based on ROS 2, with contributions from the Autoware Foundation members and community at large following best-in-class software engineering practices.  Further information at www.autoware.org