Autonomous Vehicles Get New Air Traffic Control System

The rapid succession of robotaxi deployments from companies like Waymo and Zoox have people in the industry, once again, dreaming about how autonomous vehicles might change our daily lives. That includes driverless taxi rides, sure, but also headier ideas like sending an autonomous vehicle to fetch groceries or pick up dry cleaning.If those things are ultimately going to happen, navigating the handoff moments — like where exactly a vehicle should stop to receive the groceries — will be a crucial piece of the puzzle. Palo Alto-based Autolane is trying to build that layer of infrastructure, and it now has $7.4 million in fresh funding to take on that goal.

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Autolane said it will start by coordinating pickup and drop-off points for companies that want to let robotaxis come onto their private property. The startup has signed a deal with Simon Property Group to coordinate driverless vehicle arrivals and departures at shopping centers owned by the real estate company in Austin, Texas and San Francisco, California.This deal will include creating simple, physical infrastructure like signage (think: the many kinds of Uber and Lyft pickup and drop-off stanchions that decorate modern hotels and airports) and also software.“I believe we are one of the first, let’s say, ‘application layer’ companies in autonomy,” Autolane co-founder and CEO Ben Seidl told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “We aren’t the fundamental models. We’re not building the cars. We’re not doing anything like that. We are simply saying, as this industry balloons rapidly and has exponential growth — as is already occurring this year and will occur for the next 10 years straight — someone is going to have to sit in the middle and orchestrate, coordinate, and kind of evaluate what’s going on.”

Autolane is starting with robotaxis in mind, but Seidl is clearly focused on the bigger-picture idea of applying his company’s tech to all kinds of tasks autonomous vehicles might be able to perform in the future. And he wants to move quickly with Autolane because, as he sees it, the startup doesn’t have “any direct competition” right now. He expects that to change soon.Seidl said he was convinced there was a business here after buying a Tesla last year and using the company’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance software for the first time.“As soon as my own personal car was driving me around town, pretty much flawlessly, I just — my head kind of exploded,” he said. “I was mostly enthralled by the idea that this was going to change logistics, retail, real estate, where we work, where we live, where we play, how we get around, what the price of movement of goods and services and people will be.”Seidl cited the viral incident from earlier this year where a Waymo robotaxi got stuck navigating a Chick-fil-A drive-through in Santa Monica, California, as an example of the problem Autolane is trying to head off. In that case, the robotaxi had dropped off its passengers and then struggled to negotiate the fast food company’s notorious drive-through lanes. Seidl said by using Autolane software and designating an exact pick-up and drop-off location, problems like this can be avoided in the future.

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“Someone has got to bring some order to this chaos, and the chaos is already starting,” he said.

Companies could surely do some of this work themselves, at least on the physical infrastructure side. It’s simply not that hard to make a sign.“Anyone can do that,” Seidl said. “That’s not the case, though, for autonomy. Robotics need precise instructions and precise geolocation and technological communication. You can’t just put up a white sign with some black letters and hope for the best with 10 different types of robotics coming in.”Instead, Seidl said the value of Autolane is in how it will integrate with the companies that own real estate as well as with the autonomous vehicle providers. That’s why the plan is to essentially build APIs for the physical locations so autonomous vehicle companies can receive these precise instructions. Businesses will have to “directly integrate into each one of these robotics companies, car companies, so that they follow your rules,” he said.

Seidl also said he explicitly does not want to work with cities or municipalities.

“We don’t work on public streets. We don’t work with public parking spots. We’re just providing these tools as kind of a B2B, hardware-enabled SAS solution so that Costco, or McDonald’s, or Home Depot, or, in our case, Simon Property Group, the world’s largest retail REIT [real estate investment trust] can begin to have what I like to refer to as ‘air traffic control for autonomous vehicles,’ meaning they know which ones are incoming and outgoing,” he said.