According to a report from Navigant Research, worldwide sales of vehicles with autonomous capability will grow from zero in 2014 to 94.7 million in 2035. Without waiting for the legal framework, which is currently being implemented thanks to the efforts of CityMobil2 and several European governments, the market study conducted as part of the TAXISAT project revealed that the first wave of user demand would emerge in Europe in 2015 for new, more flexible and efficient transport services in pedestrian city centres and closed areas such as industrial sites or amusement parks. These needs are be based on the use of conventional cars but rather on “pod-type vehicles” (lightweight electric vehicles, either individual, or collective). If major automotive manufacturers invest massively in the automation of their vehicles, this is not the case of these special vehicles manufacturers.
We believe that these short and medium term markets will grow so fast that current vehicle manufacturers, Transport Network Operators vehicles and Transport Organising Authorities won’t be able to adjust their services to these new challenges as quickly as required. These organisations and companies will need key skills in robotics, intelligence and fleet management.
This is the point where we come in: meeting the emerging requirements by providing off-the-shelf ARTS solutions, instead of the highly customised engineered applications which are currently in use. The latter are incompatible with a wider uptake of the technology that requires to deal with a wide variety of environments while offering a high quality of service. To take a solid position on the emerging global autonomous vehicles market and acquire an industrial dimension, we are convinced that we must combine the best tools and practices from software engineering, with deep robotics expertise in areas such as sensing, localisation, navigation.
Our ambition is to become a leader in the provision of software solutions for vehicle automation and fleet management, for passengers and goods transportation.
