Life Here

October 17, 2019 By Shirley Arnold

Come Ride with Me

Imagine a small driverless shuttle silently taking you when and where you want to go within the Paradise Valley Estates campus and patiently waiting for you to disembark before quietly driving away. This dream is becoming reality at PVE.

Optimus Ride, currently the leading company in self-driving systems for geo-fenced areas, is bringing driverless shuttles to the community. The driverless vehicles, which are engineered to operate safely in geo-fenced properties such as PVE, travel within a perimeter, not out on public roads.

Autonomous vehicles are gaining popularity everywhere because they are convenient, reduce air pollution, free up parking, reduce noise, and are efficient and quiet. The Nvidia Drive AGX platform furnishes the computational horsepower and AI stack essential for safe self-driving systems. Street-licensed vehicles currently deployed or in test programs are Google’s Waymo in Arizona, Startup Drive.ai in Arlington and Frisco, Texas, and Baidu in China.

Optimus Ride is an MIT spin-off company founded in 2015 in Boston by a team with more than 30 years of collective experience in robotics and on-demand and electric vehicles. With inclusion of PVE, the company will be operational in four states: New York, Virginia, Massachusetts and California. It was one of the first companies permitted by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to test its fleet of 25 cars on roads and public property, beginning in the Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park Seaport District. The company recently deployed a fleet of shuttles at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, providing efficient transportation for thousands of commuters from the NYC ferry to the gates of the 300-acre industrial park of 400 manufacturing businesses with 9,000 people working onsite.

In Reston, Virginia, a Washington, D.C. beltway community, Optimus Ride will operate self-driving vehicles in Brookfield Properties’ Halley Rise, a $1.4 billion mixed-use development with 36 acres of office buildings, retail space, residential property, public green spaces and cultural activities.

Kevin Burke, CEO of PVE, said, “With Optimus Ride’s self-driving system, we can attract an increasingly tech-savvy population seeking independent mobility. It also improves the daily experiences and quality of life for residents by enabling them to travel easily and safely throughout our community.”

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