A Safety-First OS for Voyage’s Driverless Technology

Announcing Renovo as the development platform for our G2 autonomous fleet

At Voyage, we fundamentally believe that the autonomous vehicle industry is at an inflection point. The number of talented companies focusing on specific verticals in the AV industry has created an ecosystem where — for the first time — a safe and robust autonomy stack can be built leveraging the expertise of partners.

Today, we’re excited to announce one such partnership. Voyage has selected Renovo’s AWare as the platform for developing our autonomous driving technology. Renovo shares our belief that the future of autonomy requires the ability to easily and safely integrate the best functionality on the market. AWare is built from the ground-up with Level 4, driverless applications in mind. From real-time execution of safety-critical operations, to a growing ecosystem of drop-in partner integrations, AWare lets us focus on what we do best: building autonomous driving technology for our communities.

What do we mean by “platform”? Renovo delivers a critical layer between the vehicle and Voyage’s autonomous driving software. It provides programmatic access to the vehicle’s sensors, safety systems, and motion control mechanisms. Popular middleware solutions like ROS are great for prototyping autonomous systems, but start hitting functional limits when building fully driverless systems. Renovo not only delivers enhanced functionality designed specifically for Level 4 applications, but also exposes a safety architecture and partner ecosystem that provide us with confidence that our autonomous driving technology will run safely, reliably, and with the best tools on the market.


Safety-First Architecture

At Voyage, our goal is to completely remove the driver from our fleet vehicles. In doing so, our top focus is always on passenger safety. We needed a platform solution that shared our safety-first philosophy.

Renovo was designed from the ground-up to support truly driverless use cases. Some of the most significant safety features that differentiate AWare include:

  • Real-time execution of safety-critical procedures
  • Hardware-level vehicle state machines
  • Quality of Service (QoS) primitives and configurable resource limits per service
  • Architectural flexibility to support redundancies in power and compute
  • System diagnostics and configurable fault handling
  • Support for tele-operations and remote braking functionality

In addition to these features, the Renovo team has extensive industry experience in delivering safe, high-performance electric and autonomous systems, making them a strong validation resource as we implement our own system-level safety redundancies.

The shared focus on safety is so strong, Renovo has agreed to join Voyage in the development of our Open Autonomous Safety (OAS) initiative. We’re excited to bring them on as an official partner!


Driving at The Villages, San Jose

Production-Ready Middleware

Building an autonomous vehicle is hard. AWare simplifies development by providing high-quality, production-ready middleware addressing common infrastructure needs of autonomous systems.

Specifically, AWare provides:

  • Robust intra-service messaging
  • Automatic, configurable telemetry, logging, and local storage
  • Vendor-agnostic abstractions for LIDAR and camera sensors (Velodyne support is great!)
  • Vehicle-specific deployment configurations
  • A flexible, time-series query language for on-vehicle data (e.g. camera frames or telemetry events)

Renovo has also done fantastic work to help us intelligently off-load and store data when our vehicles return to base each night. Their data layer supports a query interface that ensures we capture the most important data from the day, without unnecessarily waiting to off-load terabytes of redundant data from each vehicle.


Growing Partner Ecosystem

One of our favorite parts of Renovo’s approach is the belief in an open partner ecosystem. In many ways, Renovo has adopted the the successful AWS model: “we provide the infrastructure, you choose the tools”.

The Velodyne VLS-128

As a startup, one of Voyage’s most expensive investments is in one-off partner integration. Renovo helps address this through its growing catalog of drop-in integrations with industry partners. From mapping and telemetry, to sensor drivers and tele-operations, Renovo is actively building an ecosystem that allows any AWare customer to leverage a host of off-the-shelf integrations to enhance their autonomous service.

This model fundamentally makes it easier for Voyage to experiment with different industry partners and select the best functionality for our use case.


We’re extremely excited to have Renovo as a core strategic partner. Voyage is actively integrating AWare, and will be rolling it into production as part of our G2 vehicle release. Renovo’s safety-first design is an important component of our driverless taxi service, and the relationship is a great example of partnering with the industry’s best to accelerate our path toward a truly driverless taxi service.