Cyngn (or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: CYN), a developer of innovative autonomous driving software solutions for industrial and commercial markets, today announced the official launch of DriveMod Kit, a turnkey autonomous vehicle (“AV”) solution for which Cyngn filed a patent in February 2022. DriveMod Kit’s inaugural manufacturing run started coming off the assembly line in the first half of April 2022.
DriveMod Kit is a scalable solution for AV technology integration. The kit is designed to streamline retrofitting of existing industrial vehicles or simplify integration onto newly manufactured vehicles. By eliminating traditional barriers to autonomous vehicle adoption, such as high costs and complex installations, DriveMod Kit will facilitate rapid adoption of autonomous vehicles across a wide range of industrial and commercial domains.
Partnering with Columbia Vehicle Group (“Columbia”), Cyngn originally developed DriveMod Kit as an efficient AV integration package for Columbia’s Stockchaser vehicles. The kit technology can easily be adapted to fit other industrial vehicles.
“We are excited to have launched production of DriveMod Kit for Columbia’s Stockchaser. With 883,000 new material-handling vehicles sold each year in the U.S., DriveMod Kit creates a sizable opportunity for Cyngn to lead the rapid adoption of turnkey AV solutions for both retrofit and new vehicles. Installation can be done quickly and does not require special training. Anyone who works on these vehicles can retrofit an existing Columbia Stockchaser into a fully autonomous vehicle with very little effort. DriveMod Kit is a complete AV integration solution that is truly a game-changer by eliminating traditional barriers to autonomous vehicle adoption,” said Lior Tal, Cyngn CEO.
In addition to the self-driving vehicle technology, DriveMod Kit features human machine interfaces and a lighting system that communicate vehicle status, mode, battery status, route obstruction, and more.
With the swift and simple deployment that DriveMod Kit offers, manufacturers and logistics companies can begin to reap the many benefits of autonomy, such as increased productivity, improved safety, and lowered operational costs.
To see DriveMod Kit in action, please click here to watch the video.
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Video Transcript:
So my name is Nicholas Liotta, and I'm the Director of Hardware Engineering. Today, I'd like to tell you a little bit about DriveMod Kit.
DriveMod Kit is something that we've been working on with one of our vehicle partners, Columbia. It integrates all of our sensor packages together into one thing that's calibrated offline and then brought to the vehicle.
A lot of autonomous vehicles need to have engineers, software engineers, need to have people, technicians who can go and install it. The kit is designed so they can just be bolted on, run a simple script, and then it's ready to go.
So any technician or anybody who's already working on vehicles can install it and doesn't need a special set of skills. That's going to really help us scale and be able to go and deploy these in manufacturing facilities where the workforce is already there, who's maintaining these vehicles, they can easily get this DriveMod Kit.
So there are a couple of features. The one most forward-facing for the customer are the lights. And one of the key things there is for it to communicate to the world so that everybody knows what is happening within the vehicle.
And so with that, we're able to control the LEDs and then make them, if somebody wants a custom setting, because they have a custom application, we can change them and still be able to communicate with everybody in a safe environment.
It will also be able to say in an emergency situation, if something happens in the facility, we can shut it down, and the lights will indicate that the vehicle is off, no longer in autonomous mode.
There are a couple of things that I'm really excited about in the DriveMod Kit. One is I think we're really taking a practical approach to this problem. I think in a lot of spaces in the autonomous vehicles where the solutions are still pretty far out and there's a lot of red tape and things that have to be solved. Where I think right now we have something that's able to be deployed, we continue to work on it, we continue to improve it, and we can make it better while also making a service for the customers.
And one of the things with this experience is we didn't start off with the DriveMod Kit. We started off with hacking a stock chaser. And after working with the customer and working with Columbia, and really understanding what we needed to do for the retrofit, we were able to come up with a pretty concise solution. And I'm really proud of that, the way the team has worked through those things.
And it's also really nice because as we start working on our new vehicles and the next vehicles that are coming, we're taking the same DriveMod kit in the same hardware and repackaging it for the new vehicles.
So we're not starting from zero. We already have a leg up. And I think one of the things that's really nice is being able to bolt on these Drive Mod Kits, is that you're able to keep the hardware the same, change the integration, and then be able to bring these kits up very quickly with the same software.