Autonomy and Operating Systems

Renovo’s Chris Heiser: “[Automated] fleets are really going to determine what applications run on the vehicles.”

Chris Heiser is co-founder and CEO of Renovo Auto, which is developing open-platform autonomous-vehicle operating system (OS) called AWare. The company describes its new OS as “merges software, data analytics and automotive — grand safety systems into a unified solution for Automated Mobility on Demand (AMoD) fleet deployments.”

Automotive Engineering editorial director Bill Visnic recently spoke with Heiser, who holds a BSME from Carnegie Mellon University and has long been involved in the technology sector, about Renovo’s dedication to an open-platform strategy for its OS and why the company sees deployment for fleets as the most attractive target for vehicle-autonomy development.

There’s increasing pessimism about the timeline for automated vehicles being on the road “for real,” but you don’t seem skeptical at all.

I think the simplest answer is that our customers are deploying fully automated vehicles on the road this year using our systems. What people have a hard time kind of reconciling is that the word ‘autonomous’ is super-nonspecific.

What’s interesting about Automated Mobility on Demand is that most of the miles that people drive today are in these big cities. They’re not at freeway speed — they’re slow, they’re in an area that has a lot of infrastructure, lots of cell [signal] and Wi-Fi and things like that. It’s an area that you can map very accurately; you don’t have to spend a lot of money mapping because the number of actual miles of roads that you map is quite small.

The actual operational envelope for geofence autonomous is a lot simpler than what Audi needs to do to give you a fully-autonomous A4.

With AWare, you’ve created an operating system specifically for AMoD application because you think that’s where the initial revenue in autonomous development will be? Even then, it’s not necessarily just about the IP, you need volume, right?

Just like any other usage-based software licensing, volume is the thing that drives massive revenue.

The name of the game for now, for us, is make sure that we’re deploying with great customers, make sure we’re aggressively going after markets that we believe in and grow as our customers grow.

And I think, frankly, that’s true to everyone in in this space. Every lidar company, every silicon company, every AI company, we all grow only with volume.

No one makes any money by selling one of these things for a billion dollars — you make money selling lots of them for a reasonable amount.

You expect AMoD fleets to gravitate towards open-platform development such as yours?

The fleets own the customer and this is really going to be a challenge for all the major manufacturers. And it’s one of the reasons why Renovo has focused on the fleet more than we have on specific OE’s as licensees of our platform, because the fleets are really going to determine what applications run on the vehicles.

The fleets we’re working with love this model today, because it gives them choice. It allows them to work with multiple vehicle platforms and multiple self-driving stacks and multiple tele-operation systems without having to commit to one big ‘black-box’ solution from an OE or some other tech company.

What about individual autonomy and individual vehicle ownership? Is it potentially something you would see AWare also being applicable to — or is there somewhere along the development path where there would be a fairly significant divergence in what you need from an OS for fleet vehicles versus an individually-owned vehicle?

What AWare does works just as well for owned vehicles as fleet vehicles. The focus on fleets for us is because we think this is the fastest-growing and largest market for automation and it will outpace the owned-automation market by a long shot.

We’ve had people ask to use the OS for things even more outlandish than owned vehicles — and it could do those. It can do trucking. It can do sidewalk robots.It can do anything that has sensors and automation and you need to move data around at high speed.

We just believe that fleet automated is the big [application] and we are 100 percent focused on that.