TIER IV and TUM expand their collaboration
TIER IV and the Technical University of Munich have widened an existing collaboration to scale autonomous driving systems across Germany, with the work centred on NVIDIA Hyperion and the NVIDIA Halos safety system. The announcement was made at NVIDIA GTC Berlin, the companies said.
What gets integrated
According to the release, NVIDIA Hyperion is a reference sensor and compute platform for Level 4 autonomous vehicles and robotaxis, pairing NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor accelerated computing with the Halos safety system. The German initiative will put Hyperion, including dual-DRIVE AGX Thor configurations, into Autoware-based autonomous vehicle projects.
What the work builds on
The initiative follows the recent creation of the TUM Autoware Research Center by TIER IV. It combines NVIDIA's automotive-grade compute and safety technologies with Autoware's open-source software and TUM's automotive research. The stated focus is turning research into deployments, including autonomous public transport and robotaxi applications.
What the partners said
Shinpei Kato, founder and CEO of TIER IV, said scaling safe autonomous driving requires moving away from closed black-box systems toward open, interoperable architectures, and described TUM and NVIDIA as partners for that work. Rishi Dhall, vice president of automotive at NVIDIA, said Hyperion supplies the reference sensor and compute architecture needed to develop Level 4 vehicles and robotaxis at scale. Prof. Markus Lienkamp of TUM said the collaboration allows the university to test autonomous vehicle systems on German roads, and Prof. Johannes Betz said integrating such platforms pushes real-time vehicle control and software architecture further.
