Los Angeles-based Gitai said Tuesday that its autonomous robotic arm has nailed a tech demonstration outside the International Space Station. Gitai CEO Sho Nakanose told TechCrunch in an interview last year that the company aims to reduce in-space labor costs by 100 times, in the same way that SpaceX and other providers have dramatically reduced … Read more
TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. I spent a few days in Austin … Read more
Autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition has raised $250 million in a round that values the startup at $6 billion, as it pushes to bring more artificial intelligence to the automotive, defense, construction and agriculture sectors. The eye-popping funding round is the latest example of investor fervor for AI. Applied Intuition appears to have nailed … Read more
Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of. But don’t worry — they aren’t putting guns on them. Founder and CEO Richard Jenkins told TechCrunch that the demand for vessels like … Read more
Paid autonomous vehicle service is coming to Los Angeles, thanks to a decision by California regulators today to allow Alphabet subsidiary Waymo to operate in the city. Under the new ruling, Waymo is also permitted to launch service in a large section of the San Francisco Peninsula. The decision by the California Public Utilities Commission … Read more
Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images Singapore is looking to boost its national broadband network to better prepare for emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles. The country will set aside up to SG$100 million ($74.2 million) to upgrade the current nationwide network to deliver speeds of up to 10Gbps, according to Infocomm Media Development … Read more
After a few years of funding frenzy, autonomous driving companies in China are experiencing a slowdown in investment. Some companies are still hauling in capital, though the era of bankrolling several hundred million dollars in a single round has mostly passed. Haomo.ai, an autonomous driving startup backed by Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, has raised … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And more than 850,000 autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are registered … Read more
Apple’s secretive vehicle project doesn’t have much to show for its six years of work, at least publicly. But records submitted by the company to a California agency show that Apple went on an autonomous testing jag last year, almost quadrupling the number of miles it tested on public roads compared to 2022 and jumping … Read more
Jeff Farrah, CEO of lobbying group the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which counts Waymo, Cruise, and other self-driving developers in its membership, says keeping motor vehicle regulation authority firmly in states’ hands is consistent with how vehicles have been regulated in the past. “Cities have a role to play in enforcing traffic laws, but life-saving … Read more