March 2018 saw a new member, EasyMile, join the IRT Nanoelec consortium.
EasyMile was founded in 2014. This innovative company supplies driverless vehicle solutions, with services that encompass the design, development, sale, implementation, operation, and maintenance of automated transportation systems. The systems can be based on different types of driverless vehicles equipped with embedded software (location, navigation, obstacle detection, etc.) and non-embedded software (supervision, fleet management, etc.). EasyMile also provides support to its customers in France and around the globe for Smart City test/ experimentation projects involving driverless vehicles.
EasyMile is headquartered in Toulouse and has offices in Singapore, Denver, and Berlin. It is owned primarily by a private investment firm and its shareholders include Continental and Alstom.
The company has three main divisions:
- The EZ10 Division. EZ10 autonomous electric twelve-passenger shuttles have been implemented at more than 104 locations in eighteen countries and have clocked more than 120,000 kilometers since 2014. EasyMile designs, scales up, and tests the shuttles, which are manufactured and assembled by Ligier, a company that brings substantial experience in light electric vehicle manufacturing.
- The Operations Division. This division implements and maintains automated transportation systems for EasyMile customers.
- The Autonomy by EasyMile Division. This division designs, develops, and scales up solutions for autonomous vehicles for various automotive OEMs. The division is currently working with TLD, IVECO, and Renault.
EasyMile currently has more than 100 employees; the number of employees doubled in 2017.
The company would like to leverage its membership in IRT Nanoelec to improve the safety of its vehicles and address new use cases like crossing intersections and higher-speed travel. To reach these goals, EasyMile will investigate obstacle perception sensor data fusion issues and will look for solutions that offer redundancy in terms of field of vision and perception technologies.
IRT Nanoelec members possess technical solutions to EasyMile’s challenges and are positioned to support EasyMile in its strategy to develop a generic data fusion and processing framework.