Avride

Avride Inc. is a developer of self-driving cars and delivery robots. It is organized in Delaware and headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tel Aviv, and Seoul. It is a subsidiary of Nebius Group and was formerly an affiliate of Yandex called Yandex SDG.

The self-driving cars are based on mass-produced car models, such as the Toyota Prius and Hyundai Sonata. Each vehicle is equipped with four proprietary lidars, six radars and from 8 to 12 cameras. The company's semi-solid state lidars can recognize objects as far as 500 meters away and are capable of changing the scanning pattern on-flight. They can increase point cloud density in the area near the vehicle when it is moving through a courtyard, or increase range when driving at a high speed on a highway.^[3] The company has specific technologies developed to deal with bad weather. These include lidar cloud filtering from snowflakes reflections, and measuring coefficient of friction for speed and maneuver planning.^[4]

The delivery robots operate on the same technology as the company's self-driving cars and are manufactured in Taiwan. Robots are equipped with the same types of sensors as the cars including lidars, radars and cameras, and can reuse localization and perception algorithms developed for cars. Robots also reuse many neural networks, specifically for prediction of other road users’ behavior. These networks were initially developed for cars, and were tested, adapted, and implemented for the robots.^[5] Robots move at a speed of 5-8 km/h (3-5 mph), can autonomously navigate crosswalks and recognize traffic lights. Average working time on a single battery charge is about 8–12 hours. The third generation of robots, launched in November 2021, have replaceable batteries.^[6]