The background of the establishment of the Autoware Foundation, an open source project for autonomous driving

In December 2018, the Autoware Foundation, co-sponsored by Linaro 96Boards, an open source collaboration organization, Tier IV, a Japanese intelligent driving technology company, and Apex.AI, an American autonomous mobile system software company, announced its official establishment today, attracting Huawei and Sagitar to China. Enterprises join as senior members and founding industry members, respectively.

The Autoware Foundation is a non-profit organization that develops and funds Autoware, an open source collaborative project for autonomous driving. The Autoware project contains three parts Autoware.AI, Autoware.Auto and Autoware.IO.

Among them, Autoware.AI comes from the Autoware project founded by Tier IV and Shinpei Kato of Tokyo University in 2015, and is currently being used by more than 30 vehicles of more than 100 companies around the world; Autoware.Auto is a new Autoware based on ROS2.0 version for a certifiable autonomous driving software stack; Autoware.IO focuses on 96Boards-based support for heterogeneous platforms, vehicle control interfaces, and a range of third-party software and hardware tools. Autoware.IO projects contain emulators, device drivers for sensors, wire-by-wire controllers for vehicles, and SoC-independent standard system implementations.

To enable Autoware to grow and develop, Shinpei Kato from Tier IV and the University of Tokyo, Jan Becker and Linaro 96Boards from Stanford University and Apex.AI, and Zhang Yang from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences co-founded the Autoware Foundation Board of Directors.

Autoware's premium members include Apex.AI, Arm, Autocore, AutonomouStuff, Huawei, Linaro 96Boards, LG, Parkopedia, StreetDrone, Tier IV, Velodyne, and Kalray. eSOL, Nagoya University, OSRF (Open Source Robotics Foundation), RoboSense, Xilinx, SiFive, Intel, and TRI-AD (Toyota Research Institute Advanced Development Corporation) are founding industry members and academic and non-profit members of the foundation. Among them, Huawei and RoboSense joined the Autoware Foundation as senior members and founding industry members respectively. Premium members are supported by founding industry members and academic and non-profit members. In the future, a technical steering committee will be composed of senior member representatives to guide the technical development direction of the project.

Su Qing, chief architect of Huawei's autonomous driving, said that the cooperation with the Autoware Foundation enables Huawei to cooperate with the community to develop autonomous vehicle software, accelerate the development of the industry, and in turn benefit customers.

Qiu Chunchao, COO of Sagitar Juchuang, said that he will provide Autoware Foundation members with a system composed of lidar hardware and algorithms.

"Autoware has achieved widespread industry recognition and adoption, and we are delighted to build on this success by providing an open source project that supports the deployment of the development of world-leading autonomous vehicle technology," said Dr. Yang Zhang, Director of the Autoware Foundation and Director of 96Boards . "Linaro's 96Boards project will standardize the in-vehicle hardware platform to better maintain and support the development of Autoware, and expand to support more heterogeneous SoC solutions.

In addition, members of the Autoware Foundation such as Arm, Tier IV, and AutoCore have also pledged to provide project members with their own autonomous driving technologies and products.