Robotruck Selected for GENIAC Support Program to Develop Foundation Model for Level 4 Autonomous Trucks

Robotruck Inc. has been selected for the robot foundation model R&D support program under GENIAC（Generative AI Accelerator Challenge）, a project promoted by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization（NEDO）to strengthen domestic AI foundation model development capabilities. With support from this program, Robotruck will use large-scale GPU computing resources for model training and other work, pursuing R&D on a foundation model for Level 4 autonomous trucks using a world model and a Diffusion Planner. The company aims to enable autonomous driving on trunk transportation routes, including ordinary roads, and to introduce autonomous driving into logistics companies’ transport operations between existing sites. Robotruck has previously built up driving experience with Level 2 systems on expressways between the Kanto and Chubu regions through participation in projects including METI’s support program for unmanned autonomous driving development and demonstration to promote Mobility DX, and MLIT’s demonstration project for the social implementation of trunk transportation by autonomous trucks. As a next step toward the social implementation of autonomous trucks, Robotruck will use this program to accelerate development of an AI foundation model centered on a multimodal world model and a Diffusion Planner. The multimodal world model acts as an internal simulator that predicts future changes in the surrounding environment and the vehicle’s behavior in latent space, while the Diffusion Planner uses the world model’s latent representations to generate multimodal and safe driving paths. These technologies are expected to help the system understand dynamic interactions through massive training data and achieve safe driving even in complex ordinary-road environments involving pedestrians, bicycles, intersections, stop signs, and other factors. If existing logistics facilities adjacent to ordinary roads can be used as departure and arrival bases for autonomous trucks, this would bring social implementation significantly closer at an early stage and at reasonable cost. Yusuke Haga, Representative Director and CEO of Robotruck, said the company is deeply grateful for the strong support from METI and NEDO, which highly evaluated Robotruck’s vision for the social implementation of domestically developed autonomous trucks, as well as its R&D plans for a multimodal world model and Diffusion Planner. He added that Robotruck is not a truck manufacturer or logistics operator, but a systems company that provides autonomous driving systems on the premise that logistics operators themselves will operate the vehicles. The company is focused on realizing Level 4-capable autonomous driving technology as quickly as possible. Although overseas players have recently taken the lead in autonomous driving development, logistics is a social infrastructure that supports all domestic industries, and Japan requires domestically developed autonomous driving technology in this field. As a Japanese autonomous driving startup, Robotruck says its entire team will push development forward at full speed to contribute to the introduction of 1,000 autonomous trucks, a goal stated in Japan’s comprehensive logistics policy outline. GENIAC（Generative AI Accelerator Challenge）is a project that mainly provides computing resources for the development of foundation models, the core technology of generative AI, and supports demonstration studies for the utilization of data and AI. Company overview: Robotruck Inc. is located at Odanaka Building, 1-15-11 Shinkawa, Chuo-ku, Tokyo. Its representative is Yusuke Haga, Representative Director and CEO. The company was founded in April 2024 and conducts R&D on autonomous driving systems for trucks. Official website: https://robotruck.jp/company.html. Contact: Robotruck Inc., Business Development and Public Relations, E-mail: info@robotruck.jp.