Autonomous, self-driving or driverless vehicles have captured the imagination of everyone across the globe. Through significant advances in machine learning, LIDAR, computer vision, and computational power, the technology industry is poised to take on this challenge like never before. While Tesla is leading the game, Indian startups are not far behind in their research for building autonomous vehicles for both on-road and other commercial applications. Here are some notable examples.

• Minus Zero- Founded in 2020 by two young boys from Punjab, Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, this claims to be the first startup in the world to be working towards building level 5 autonomy for unstructured Indian roads. Minus Zero envisions a culture of shared mobility for Indians to tackle the rising cost of owning a private car. In the short span of a year, the company has already developed several patentable proprietary technologies taking them closer to the dream of putting an autonomous car on Indian roads. They aim to achieve Level 5 autonomy by 2023, in partnership with an automotive OEM.​
• Flux Auto- This Bangalore-based startup is building capabilities to transform commercial mobility in India. They develop autonomous driving for Indian highways, some of the most chaotic and unpredictable roadways in the world. The hardware and software technologies have been engineered from the ground up to democratise autonomous trucking. Most importantly, their technology can be retrofitted into existing trucks to upgrade them to driverless trucks.
• Swaayatt Robots- This is a Bhopal-based startup that is focused on developing Level-5 autonomous driving technology for adversarial traffic and unstructured environments. Their mission is to make connected autonomous driving technology accessible, affordable and available to everyone. The founder Sanjeev Sharma had initiated his research in autonomous navigation in 2009 as an undergrad student at IIT Roorkee. Today, Swaayatt Robots is focused on highly stochastic traffic dynamics, for both the on- and off-road applications.
• Ati Motors- The is a Bangalore-based startup that has developed an autonomy stack for material movement in industrial environments. Ati Motors’ Sherpa is the only autonomous industrial vehicle in this class globally that delivers autonomy for both indoor and outdoor scenarios. This increases the operational space from factory floor to yard level autonomy and also in-campus road network. V Vinay, Saurabh Chandra and Saad Nasser have founded Ati Motors in Feburary 2017.
• Fisheyebox- The team at Fisheyebox is fundamentally working on human inspired driving. They have developed an all-in-one solution for an intelligent drive system which can be interfaced with any automotive grade drive-by-wire platform in the world. It's the brain for the autonomous and connected vehicles. Fisheyebox was founded in 2015 by Pinaki Laskar.

Image by Julien Tromeur from Pixabay