Venti Technologies announced last Monday that it has entered into an agreement with Anji Technology of SAIC Anji Logistics (Anji-Tec) to develop Smart Logistics – self-driving vehicles for goods movement including autonomous tug-trailer operating systems for the daily movement of automobile production parts within Anji’s central operations parks.
SAIC Anji Logistics is China’s largest automotive logistics provider, supporting the annual transport of approximately 10 million vehicles. The Venti-enabled tug-trailers will use proprietary perception, localisation and navigation to ensure optimised parts delivery for finished vehicles, in turn enabling Anji’s brand partners to focus on their core competencies of automobile development. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Venti Technologies’ flexible, algorithmic-based autonomous vehicle technology is uniquely capable of supporting the complexities of a large-scale logistics operation including meeting scheduling requirements, managing weight loads, navigating distances, avoiding obstacles, executing corners, and delivering to specified locations. In this partnership, Venti and Anji-Tec will collaborate on the development and deployment of a fully operational tug-trailer system including, for example, the ability to pick up parts at designated stations in the warehouse, navigate traffic, intersections, traffic lights and other vehicles, and deliver and park at specified locations.
“This new agreement with the world’s largest automotive logistics provider is a key milestone for Venti,” said Shuyan Zhao, co-founder and chief operating officer of Venti. “This is an important validation of the agility of our proprietary approach to autonomous vehicle technology, and the meaningful impact of our technology on the crucial ‘first mile’ of logistics management. We look forward to working with Anji-Tec to develop this critical capability.”
“Our focus is on providing customers with advanced intelligent logistics solutions. We know that if we ensure speed and accuracy in logistics management, we can more effectively deliver completed goods to a myriad of customers,” commented Bin Jin, CEO of the Anji-Tech. “The agreement will bring together the expertise of the two industry leaders in our respective domains to create value-added solutions. Venti Technologies’ safe speed self-driving technology is best-in-class and offers the right combination of accuracy, agility and ability to improve our autonomous logistics operations.”
Venti’s autonomous mobility platform surpasses slow, inflexible situation-based-coded systems through Deep Learning and Model Predictive Control algorithms. Venti-enabled vehicles map as they go, adapting to complex environments and challenging situations through algorithms that use abstract information constructs. Venti autonomous vehicles see small obstacles such as a 12-oz. can on the road, and around corners. The AVs do not need lane markers or beacons, can drive forwards and backwards, can do three- and five-point-turns and have state-of-the-art rain operation. Venti’s system is the first in the world to improve both obstacle detection and vector velocity estimation accuracy by merging the analyses to enable AVs to drive safely and reliably in complex environments.
