Blog

The story of autonomous driving is a long and interesting one. Read about our endeavors along this journey.

The launch of Autoware Mini

We’d like you to meet Autoware Mini — a minimalistic Python-based autonomy software that we built from scratch. How come we decided that the world needs another piece of autonomous driving software? Three words: ease of use.

We realized that making progress on our Autoware-based platform was unnecessarily slow. The back and forth between our engineers and researchers got constantly hung up on the technicalities of the capable yet complex system. As a result, we decided to roll up our sleeves and take matters into our own hands.

The result is a lean software stack with a six-module architecture and a couple thousand lines of code. We are quite confident that it will serve the needs of the lecturers, instructors and researchers of the autonomous driving community. Although we don’t have productization in mind, we are hopeful that the self-driving companies can make good use of it as well.

By the way, Autoware Mini is open-source — check it out!

Together with Autoware Mini, we are also releasing a new version or the digital twin of the Tartu city center implemented in the Carla simulation engine. This presents a unique opportunity to test your self-driving vehicle in Tartu without being physically present.

You may also want to check out Tambet’s introduction of Autoware Mini during the UniTartuCS’ Data Science Seminar, where he elaborates on the reasoning behind creating Autoware Mini and its technical implementation.