During a recent visit at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada’s Minister of Transportation Jeff Yurek showed his support for the innovation and growth of the autonomous vehicle industry within the Canadian province. Ontario has updated its Automated Vehicle Pilot program to allow for more testing of emerging technologies, as well as to support future sales of the next generation of automobiles. These actions are a part of a recent package to create jobs by eliminating red tape and burdensome regulations.

Japan's largest airline All Nippon Airways (ANA) has begun the second stage of testing for an autonomous, driverless bus at Tokyo's Haneda Airport. In collaboration with several companies, ANA began testing the autonomous bus on Tuesday, Jan. 15, in a series of trials scheduled to run through Jan 25. During the trials, the bus will operate autonomously, but a human driver will be present to take over if necessary (Level 3 automation). The vehicle will be limited to the restricted area of Haneda Airport where aircraft and cargo vehicles are located. ANA says that if the trials are successful, it will seek to implement the driverless bus technology into the airport by next year.

In response to growing commercial demand from 12 contracted customers, TuSimple has announced that it currently has 11 trucks operating fully autonomously in the U.S., with plans for that number to reach 40 by June. TuSimple has also announced that right now, it makes three to five fully-autonomous trips per day for customers on three different routes in Arizona, with another route from Arizona to Texas expected to launch early next year. According to TuSimple, it is the only self-driving truck company running daily fully-autonomous commercial routes from depot-to-depot, which requires highway driving, as well as local street driving.

With enabling automated driving applications in mind, Xilinx Inc., which specializes in adaptive and intelligent computing, has announced a new strategic collaboration with German car parts maker ZF Friedrichshafen that will result in Xilinx’s technology powering ZF's highly-advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-based automotive control unit known as ZF ProAI. Xilinx’s Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC platform is being used by ZF to handle real-time data aggregation, pre-processing, and distribution. The platform is also being used to provide compute acceleration for the AI processing in ZF's new AI-based electronic control unit.