Founded in 2021 by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, Minus Zero claims to be the first Indian startup to launch a fully autonomous vehicle in the country with its nature-inspired AI tech
Minus Zero’s zPod is one of the few fully autonomous vehicles worldwide that can run with only camera sensors, eliminating the need for expensive tech like LiDARs
The startup is doing extensive pilots in partnership with various industry stakeholders like sensor companies, chip makers, OEMs, and the government
Ever since the rise in the production of cars in the 1920s, the global automotive industry has been obsessed with plying driverless four-wheelers on roads. Although we have instances in the past of many automotive players using radio waves to make cars go driverless, the tech couldn’t be made road legal due to reasons galore.Founded in 2021 by two undergraduate students, Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, Minus Zero claims to be the first Indian startup to launch a fully autonomous vehicle in the country with its in-house AI solution.“This approach is inherently fragile because it is nearly impossible to have well-representative data of every possible variation of the environments,” the startup highlights in its whitepaper.“The purpose of minus zero was never to really build autonomous vehicles. We were always intrigued by how a human brain is able to do a lot of things that current algorithms are not capable of doing. So, that is what nature-inspired AI intends to solve, bridging the gap between algorithms, machines, and the human brain. Mobility is just a use case,” says Reehal.
As the tide of time rolled on, multiple levels of automation unravelled on the back of the involvement of core technology players and extensive research and development in the field. Subsequently, various levels of automation were reached, and today, many countries across the globe gloat over having level 5 autonomous tech, paving the way for a future embracing truly unmanned cars.