May Mobility, an autonomous driving technology company, has launch a corporate autonomous vehicle service that will utilize the Toyota-manufactured e-Palette vehicle.
The mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) vehicle platform will be operated in Toyota’s Miyata factory, in Fukuoka, Japan. The full name of the site is the Toyota Motor Kyushu (TMK) Miyata factory.
The service uses a custom version of the e-Palette battery-electric vehicle and will provide an efficient and effective transit option for factory employees and guests.
In 2022, May Mobility was provided access to Toyota’s next-generation e-Palette platform to install May Mobility’s technologies into the e-Palette platform, including its autonomous driving kit and Multi-Policy Decision Making technology.
To prove the technology’s capability, May Mobility performed robust testing and evaluation in Japan, demonstrating key performance requirements and improved vehicle behavior.
The Toyota e-Palette is a battery-electric, mobility-as-a-service vehicle platform. The e-Palette will come pre-configured with leads for third-party autonomous driving kits, including spaces for sensors and computing systems.
Using the data gathered from sensors around the vehicle, May Mobility’s patented MPDM technology will enable real-time reinforcement learning, assessing thousands of potential scenarios per second, even when encountering never-before-seen situations, allowing May Mobility’s technology in the e-Palette to leverage artificial intelligence to continuously improve its driving capabilities during the course of the TMK deployment.
Edwin Olson, CEO and co-founder of May Mobility, says: “Our long-standing relationship with Toyota is key to driving innovation within the mobility-as-a-service space and I’m excited to expand our autonomous vehicle product offering with the e-Palette’s larger, EV form factor.
“Toyota’s e-Palette platform together with May Mobility’s technologies will help drive us toward our vision of greater transportation accessibility across Japan.”
The new service at TMK provides an additional transportation option to employees and guests during regular business hours, Monday through Friday.
The service route includes six stops at regular intervals through a designated zone or loop, starting from the southeast corner and continuing up and around the northern end of the facility before returning to its origin location.
This is intended to serve as the first of a number of future deployments of e-Palette transportation services in Japan.
Following local safety regulations, the e-Palette vehicles used in the Toyota Miyata factory will have an autonomous vehicle operator to supervise the vehicle’s autonomous driving.
The service at the Miyata factory is one of several operations planned for Japan this year. Monet Technologies is also participating in this project and will collaborate on additional services in the future.
May Mobility will also work with its investor NTT for future service rollouts in Japan.
May Mobility has provided more than 400,000 rides in the US and Japan, including deployments in Nagoya City, Japan; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Detroit, Michigan; Grand Rapids, Minnesota; Miami, Florida; Arlington, Texas; Martinez, California; and Sun City, Arizona.
