Autolane makes ‘air traffic control’ for autonomous vehicles

The rapid succession of robotics from companies like Waymo and Zoox has people in the industry, once again, dreaming of how autonomous vehicles could change our daily lives. This certainly includes driverless taxi rides, but also fancier ideas like sending an autonomous vehicle to pick up groceries or pick up dry cleaning.

If these things are ultimately going to happen, navigating the moments of surrender — like where exactly a vehicle will have to stop to receive the groceries — it will be a critical piece of the puzzle. Based in Palo Alto Autolane is trying to build that level of infrastructure and now has $7.4 million in new funding to achieve that goal.

Backed by VC firms such as Draper Associates and Hyperplane, Autolane said it will start by coordinating pick-up and drop-off points for companies that want to let robotaxis onto their private property. The startup has signed a deal with Simon Property Group to coordinate the arrivals and departures of driverless vehicles at malls owned by the real estate company in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco, California.

This arrangement will involve the creation of simple, physical infrastructure such as signage (think: the many Uber and Lyft pick-up and drop-off items that adorn modern hotels and airports) as well as software.

“I think we’re 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’re not the foundational models. We don’t make the cars. We don’t do anything like that. We’re just saying as this industry ramps up and grows exponentially — as it already is this year and will be for the next 10 years — someone’s going to have to sit in the middle and orchestrate and coordinate and evaluate.”

Autolane started with robotics in mind, but Seidl is clearly focused on the idea of ​​applying his company’s technology to all kinds of tasks that autonomous vehicles could perform in the future. And he wants to move quickly with Autolane because, as he sees it, the startup has no “direct competition” right now. He expects that to change soon.

Seidl said he was convinced there was a business here after he bought a Tesla last year and used the company’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance software for the first time.

“Once my own personal car drove me around the city, almost flawlessly, it just – my head exploded,” he said. “I was mostly excited 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 moving goods and services and people will be.”

Seidl cited the viral incident 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 address. In that case, the robotaxi had dropped off its passengers and subsequently struggled to negotiate the fast food company’s infamous driving lanes. Seidl said that by using the Autolane software and setting an accurate pickup and drop-off location, problems like this can be avoided in the future.

“Someone has to bring order to this chaos, and the chaos has already begun,” he said.

Companies could certainly do some of this work themselves, at least on the physical infrastructure side. It’s just not that hard to make a mark.

“Anybody can do it,” Seidl said. “That’s not the case for autonomy, though. Robotics needs precise instructions and precise geolocation and technological communication. You can’t just put a white sign with some black letters and hope for the best with 10 different types of robotics coming.”

Instead, Seidl said Autolane’s value lies in how it will integrate with real estate companies as well as autonomous vehicle providers. So the plan is essentially to create APIs for physical locations so that autonomous vehicle companies can get those exact directions. Businesses will have to “integrate directly into each of these robotics companies, car companies, so that they follow your rules,” he said.

Seidl also made it clear that he does not want to work with cities or municipalities.

“We don’t work on public roads. We don’t work with public parking lots. We just provide these tools as a kind of SAS B2B solution, hardware enabled, so that Costco, or McDonald’s, or Home Depot, or, in our case, Simon Property Group, the largest retail REIT in the world [real estate investment trust] it can start to have what I like to refer to as ‘air traffic control for autonomous vehicles,’ meaning they know what’s coming in and what’s going out,” he said.