Minus Zero unveils India’s first AI-driven autonomous vehicle

Bengaluru, June 5 Minus Zero unveiled India’s first autonomous vehicle based on a camera-sensor suite on zDay 2023.
With the ability to scale up to Level 5 autonomy capabilities, the vehicle can drive itself in all environmental and geographical constraints.
The honour of the first ride in a zPod was shared by Kris Gopalakrishnan and the founders.
Observing a big gap of technology-driven growth in the current mobility industry, Minus Zero was co-founded in 2021 by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, to enable safe and scalable autonomous driving via their proprietary approach to AI.
Sharing their vision for the mobility industry, they also released a whitepaper at the event,introducing their approach, dubbed ‘Nature-Inspired AI’ (NIA).
The guests witnessed the vehicle’s ability to navigate real-world scenarios safely, ensuring reliability and a smooth user experience. zPod, powered by True Vision Autonomy (TVA),demonstrated real-world maneuvers like overtaking, blind turns, and vehicle following without human supervision using only monocular cameras.
Highlighting the company’s disruption in the mobility sector, CEO and co-founder GagandeepReehal adds, “Due to the lack of safe autonomous vehicle solutions, many lives are lost each year, and economies lose several billion dollars. With true vision autonomy coming to the fore,one can make autonomous vehicles a reality, solving major pain points of the mobility paradigm.”
TVA is a new inflection point in the mobility industry. It can adapt to any use case and vehicle form factor, opening the doors for next-generation vehicles to harness the capability of full autonomy in the future.
Through its innovations and AI breakthroughs, Minus Zero offers a blank canvas to all automotive OEMs.
Speaking about the company’s innovative approach, co-founder Gursimran Kalra says, “Our concepts are a new revolution in the automotive industry. They allow automakers to explore new design possibilities for vehicles, currently limited by the constraints of a driver-led design. Weaim to redefine mobility from a driver-centric hassle to a user-focused experiential design.”
The future of mobility is connected and autonomous, with no constraints of installing a steering wheel or following the redundant vehicle design meant for driving in one direction, he said.
The vehicle can take any form factor, like a Pod, wherein passengers can sit facing each other -encouraging conversation – and enjoy their journey without stressing about driving, Kalra said.
Minus Zero envisions targeting a larger global mobility market with True Vision Autonomy. The company has identified near-term use cases through multiple trials and proof-of-concept for in-campus mobility and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), he said.
It has planned the expansion of trials to foreign markets with stable regulatory norms over the next two years, including public road trials. With such path breaking advancements and revolutionary concepts, India is poised to become the face of mobility worldwide, Kalra said.
Nature-inspired AI is a novel approach to building generalized autonomous agents inspired by physics-aware vision and the predictive decision-making capabilities of a human brain, making it efficient in handling real-world road scenarios, unlike traditional AI, Kalra said.