Uncrewed Systems Technology 043 l Auve Tech Iseauto taxi l Charging focus l Advanced Navigation Hydrus l UGVs insight l MVVS 116 l Windracers ULTRA l CES 2022 show report l ECUs focus I Distant Imagery

24 A uve Tech has won recognition over the past few years for producing a self-driving shuttle taxi engineered for SAE Level 4 autonomy, particularly in closed- driving conditions such as campuses for universities, hospitals and business parks. The company was spun out from Tallinn Technical University, in Estonia, and Silberauto (a Baltic distributor of Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi and other car brands) in 2018. Its creation began after a meeting between the university and Silberauto in 2017 that originally centred on looking for the best way to celebrate the university’s 100th anniversary of its founding. The electric Iseauto was conceived from that discussion, but not just as a symbol of the university’s automotive advances. As the project’s engineers saw it, their eventual creation would yield two considerable benefits. The first, and probably more obvious, is that making a vehicle powered electrically cuts its emissions to zero. To that end, the taxi has been tested extensively with battery-electric and hydrogen-electric powertrains, the latter being deemed more suitable for hot and cold climates, and also using a fuel cell technology unlike any we have featured in the past. The second is that having autonomous taxis will hopefully make shared, smart mobility a convenient and dependable alternative to car ownership, and hence gradually reduce road congestion, along with all the pollution and stress it inflicts on society (a hope previously expressed by Nutonomy in UST 10, October/ November 2016, among others). “Once all of us at that meeting agreed we wanted to make an autonomous vehicle, we started researching different markets in which such solutions could be viable,” recounts Johannes Mossov, CEO of Auve Tech. “It was a close race between a few vehicle types, but eventually the prospect of making a low-speed, last-mile commuting shuttle won out. “Within a year, we’d completed our first prototype, which we operated in the university campus at different events April/May 2022 | Unmanned Systems Technology The Iseauto is an autonomous, eight-seat taxi from Auve Tech, a spin-out from the Technical University of Tallinn, in Estonia (Images courtesy of Auve Tech)