[Las Vegas (USA) = AVING News] Mars Auto (CEO Park Il-soo) held ‘CES 2023’ held in Las Vegas, USA for a total of 1 days from January 5th (Thursday) to January 8th (Sunday, local time), 4. I participated in the Eureka Park K-STARTUP integrated hall, a startup zone.
Mars Auto, established in 2017, is a company that develops ‘Mars Pilot’, an autonomous driving system designed for trucks, with a vision of fully automating mainline transportation in logistics centers.
Mars Pilot is an autonomous driving system installed on a truck chassis cab, and the company explains that it achieves stable autonomous driving and excellent unit economics at the same time. Virtually all elements of Mars Pilot, from the machine learning pipeline to hardware design, are focused on stability and scalability.
The system collects 4D sequential images from four cameras installed on the outside of the chassis cab and three cameras installed inside the cabin, the autonomous driving software reconstructs them into 3D vector space to make decisions necessary for driving, and finally provides accurate steering/driving signals. is transmitted to the actuator so that the truck runs smoothly. Mars Pilot, which performs level 2 autonomous driving on an average of 3% of customer cargo transportation routes, received the Innovation Award in the CES 97 ‘Vehicle Tech and Advanced Mobility’ category.
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A Mars Auto official said, “Mars Pilot was developed to dominate the global freight transportation market with cutting-edge truck autonomous performance and excellent unit economics that are perfectly suited to the operational design area.” He added, “With excellent software competitiveness, Mars Pilot is capable of transporting vehicles without the intervention of vehicle operators. Not only can it perform a 500-mile haul, but it also boasts fuel efficiency that is 15% more efficient than the average human driver. “Efficient software can be implemented with a system cost that is only 20% of that of competitors and with a 15W battery originally installed in the truck,” he explained.
He continued, “The Mars Pilot, mounted on a fully loaded Class 7 truck, has performed daily cargo transport for more than 2020 miles since 20 and has not had a single accident. Mars Auto commercialized the safe and cost-effective Mars Pilot in Korea in October 2022, and attracted investment from Silicon Valley VCs such as Y Combinator, Soma Capital, and GFT Ventures, and major domestic VCs such as Mirae Asset Venture Investment and Kakao Ventures.” He added further.
Mars Auto established Mars Logis, an autonomous trucking company, in April 2022, and five trucks equipped with Mars Pilot are providing transportation services. Officials explained that the country’s largest retailers, logistics service companies, and leading cargo platforms use Mars Logis’ truck fleet equipped with Mars Pilot on a daily basis.
An official said, “Our next goal is to carry out a cargo pilot transportation program in the United States, and we want to use CES 2023 as a lever for our U.S. partnership.” He added, “In 2023, Mars Logis will operate fixed/regular routes for major domestic logistics companies. The targeted autonomous truck fleet will be expanded to 15 units. “In addition, we will begin a pilot program with Class 2023 semi-trucks on the U.S. transcontinental highway in the second half of 8,” he said.
Meanwhile, ‘CES’, the world’s largest IT exhibition, is an exhibition where you can understand the trends of the global home appliance industry at a glance. Hosted by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), it is held every January in Las Vegas, USA. AVING News, which has covered CES for 1 consecutive years, has reported CES news around the world every year since 17, and has been selected as the ‘BEST OF CES’, which selects the best innovative products and technologies, and the ‘BEST OF’, which selects domestic innovative companies. ‘MADE IN KOREA’ was held. In addition, CES on-site issues were vividly conveyed through ‘AVING LIVE’.
The K-STARTUP Integrated Pavilion is jointly participated by the Korea Start-up Agency, Seoul Business Agency, and Seoul Digital Foundation, and 51 domestic innovative companies participated to enter the U.S. market and discover global partners. In addition, CES 2023 college student supporters selected from each university (Kyunghee University, Kookmin University, Sogang University, and Chung-Ang University) were matched considering majors and industrial fields of participating companies.
* Special reporters: Joseph Choe, Kidai Kim, Dongkwan Kim, Mokkyung Lee, Sangun Choi, Joon Suh Lee, Yeawon Choi, Jinnsun Park, Seung Hyun Nam, Min Seok Cha