India's first completely autonomous vehicle is unveiled by AI startup Minus Zero
Minus Zero, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, unveiled what it claimed is India’s first autonomous vehicle based on a camera-sensor suite. The concept vehicle named zPod was designed and developed by the proprietary technological innovative concepts of Nature Inspired AI (NIA) and True Vision Autonomy (TVA) of the founders of the company.
Minus Zero was co-founded in 2021 by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, to enable safe and scalable autonomous driving via their proprietary approach to AI called NIA. zPod, which drove autonomously without a steering wheel, was showcased at the commercial office park Embassy TechVillage. With the ability to scale up to Level 5 autonomy capabilities, the vehicle can drive itself in all environmental and geographical constraints, the company said in a media release.
The honour of the first ride in a zPod was shared by Kris Gopalakrishnan and the founders. The vehicle navigated real-world scenarios safely, ensuring reliability and a smooth user experience. zPod, powered by TVA, demonstrated real-world manoeuvres like overtaking, blind turns, and vehicle following without human supervision using only monocular cameras.
Minus Zero introduced the concept of TVA using NIA. The company believes TVA is the safest and most scalable approach to autonomous driving as it is vehicle agnostic and relies only on cameras as its sensor suite. CEO and co-founder Gagandeep Reehal, said, “Due to the lack of safe autonomous vehicle solutions, many lives are lost each year, and economies lose several billion dollars. With true vision autonomy coming to the fore, one can make autonomous vehicles a reality, solving major pain points of the mobility paradigm.”
TVA is a new inflection point in the mobility industry. It can adapt to any use case and vehicle form factor, opening the doors for next-generation vehicles to harness the capability of full autonomy in the future. Through its innovations and AI breakthroughs, Minus Zero offers a blank canvas to all automotive OEMs, co-founder Gursimran Kalra said. “Our concepts are a new revolution in the automotive industry. They allow automakers to explore new design possibilities for vehicles, currently limited by the constraints of a driver-led design. We aim to redefine mobility from a driver-centric hassle to a user-focused experiential design,” he added.
Minus Zero envisions targeting a larger global mobility market with TVA. The company has identified near-term use cases through multiple trials and proof-of-concept for in-campus mobility and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). It has planned the expansion of trials to foreign markets with stable regulatory norms over the next two years, including public road trials. With such pathbreaking advancements and revolutionary concepts, India is poised to become the face of mobility worldwide, the company said..
Sharing their vision for the mobility industry, the founders released a whitepaper at the event, introducing their approach, dubbed ‘Nature-Inspired AI’ (NIA), which is a new way to build generalized autonomous agents inspired by physics-aware vision and the predictive decision-making capabilities of a human brain, making it efficient in handling real-world road scenarios, unlike traditional AI. The white paper, available for public viewing, shares the guiding principles for the safe and scalable adoption of truly AI-driven mobility, the release said.
According to Minus Zero, the autonomous vehicle industry is eclipsed by three challenges - expensive hardware, the requirement of extensive data, and navigation through complex traffic conditions and unruly infrastructure. The traditional robotics paradigm currently being used to build AI is prone to failure when facing scenarios it hasn't been trained on. With the sky-high costs related to sophisticated on-vehicle hardware and data acquisition for AI training, these AI algorithms are inherently far from being deployment-ready for real-world conditions.
The launch of a safe and scalable AV product is still awaited despite billion-dollar investments in R&D by trillion-dollar companies over the last ten years. Minus Zero’s proprietary nature-inspired algorithm tackles the three barriers between the existing AI systems and human brain capabilities - real-time low-power processing, adaptability to uncertain or chaotic real-road conditions, and the elimination of the need to re-learn driving for different use cases, geographies, or vehicles, the release said.
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