Indian technology services company Tata Elxsi and Californian machine perception developer AEye have completed an in-house concept demonstrator vehicle, RoboTaxi. The demonstrator incorporates AEye’s iDAR smart sensor platform, and Tata Elxsi’s autonomous stack.

iDAR is a software-definable smart sensor that supports dynamic region of interest (ROI) and cuing of sensors, improving the reliability of detection and classification, while extending the range at which objects can be detected, classified and tracked to enhance safe, reliable vehicle autonomy.

Tata Elxsi’s RoboTaxi is built on top of its software middle-ware platform Autonomai, with deep learning and AI capabilities. Users can travel in a RoboTaxi from their current location to a selected destination with the press of a button on the screen.

Tata Elxsi says that the vehicle is fully autonomous and can manage cross-traffic detection at a junction and round-about, follow the road ahead, and cuing the sensor with HD maps and V2X information. Tata Elxsi is responsible for iDAR integration into the vehicle, interfacing with the AD stack, simulation, vehicle testing and demonstration for AEye.

AEye’s system can scale for “Autonomy on-demand”, allowing – it claims – for any hardware implementation, from low-cost ADAS to integrated 360 degree RoboTaxi functionality. AEye recently announced the ability to move selective perception capabilities to the edge of the network, onto the sensor itself.

“Tata Elxsi has been a wonderful development partner, helping us to extend the software capabilities of the iDAR platform and integrate iDAR into a fully realised autonomous driving stack,” said Abhijit Thatte, VP of AI and software at AEye. “Building a reference autonomous system from the ground up, based on iDAR as the artificial perception platform, is a fantastic achievement for the AEye and Tata Elxsi’s AD/ADAS team. We are excited to be demonstrating some of the unique capabilities of iDAR and how they can accelerate the deployment of autonomous features in vehicles.”

“iDAR is a powerful perception platform, and it has been an exceptional opportunity to work with iDAR and the AEye team to realise our shared vision of how to implement autonomous driving,” said Nitin Pai, Chief Marketing Officer, and Strategy Head of Tata Elxsi. “We look forward to continuing to work together to deliver exciting new capabilities in 2020.”