A few days off to enjoy real-life family and events. A little less attention paid to driverless while immersed in much home baking of holiday and rye breads for friends and family. (Everyone needs a source of good bread, but truly here's nothing like homemade. Not that I am the best baker, but a fresh homemade bread has amazing taste and is pure comfort food. Plus, naturally leavened bread is far healthier than breads made with commercial yeast. Rant over.)
The result? I fell woefully behind - for just a few days - on driverless news. Really, driverless news should not come out if I am not paying attention.
Acquisitions and money flowing
German-based Infineon acquires Innoluce BV, a Dutch producer of miniature, and potentially a very cheap, lidar technology. Infineon us a chip manufacturer. Here's a Business Insider article about the acquisition, which also explains well the differences in production costs.
A French driverless shuttle startup, Navya, is receiving a funding boost from, among others, Keolis, a large international transportation and transit company. The boost is to the tune of $34 million, with a $224 million valuation that demonstrates the current groupthink about Navya.
MIT-spawned Optimus Ride is also receiving an infusion of about $5 million. No specifics on the emerging technology that Optimus is incubating, but there is deep autonomous vehicle experience on the staff of the Boston startup.
Technology advance
The University of California at Riverside (UC Riverside) has created a new type of navigation technology. The technology does not rely on GPS, which does not work well in certain settings (such as mountain valleys), and instead relies on existing signals, such as cellular networks and wifi.
Finally on the street
After announcements and plans, finally, finally, driverless cars have appeared on the streets of Milton Keynes, a city in England. They are slow - at 5 mph - and cute and there. Australia, site of the current ITS World Congress conference, has hosted an actual driverless car on its roads as well. Bosch is the producer of the driverless system used on that car.
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