May Mobility, an autonomous driving technology company has launched a corporate autonomous vehicle (AV) service that will utilize Toyota’s e-Palette mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) vehicle platform. This trial will take place at the Miyata factory of the Toyota Motor Kyushu (TMK) manufacturing complex in Fukuoka, Japan. The May Mobility-led service uses a custom version of the e-Palette EV and will provide a new transit option for factory employees and guests.
The Toyota e-Palette at the center of the trial is a battery-electric, MaaS vehicle platform that will be pre-configured with leads for third-party autonomous driving kits. These will include spaces for sensors and computing systems, such as May Mobility’s Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) technology that will be integrated into the e-Palette as part of the trial. This integration will support the AV’s development and autonomous capabilities by applying real-time reinforcement learning to data gathered from its suite of sensors. While assessing thousands of potential scenarios every second, even when encountering unique and unanticipated situations, MPDM will leverage AI to continuously improve the e-Palette’s driving capabilities over the course of the TMK trial.
At TMK, the service to be offered through the trial will offer employees of, and visitors to, the factory with an additional transportation option that will be offered through regular business hours, five days per week. Its route will include six stops conducted at regular intervals through a designated zone or loop: starting from the plant’s southeast corner, continuing around the northern end of the facility, and returning to its starting location before repeating this journey. In following the region’s local safety regulations, the e-Palette vehicles used in the Toyota Miyata factory will operate with a human driver behind the wheel that will supervise its autonomous driving and intervene if necessary.
Toyota highlighted that the TMK service is intended to be the first of many deployments involving the e-Palette, with future transportation trials and service envisioned taking place further across Japan. For Toyota, it represents one of several similar operations planned to take place in the country this year. Here, May Mobility will work with its investor, NTT, for future service rollouts.
This collaboration between May Mobility and Toyota follows the beginning of their partnership in 2022, when the autonomous vehicle technology company was provided access to the e-Palette platform to install its technologies, including its autonomous driving kit and MPDM technology. Their capabilities were tested and evaluated in Japan to demonstrate how they could encourage key performance requirements and enhanced vehicle behavior.
