One cold October afternoon in the Mojave Desert, on the heels of participation in the historic 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge semi-finals, a pioneering and historic event for driverless vehicles, founder Paul Perrone turned on the Company’s first autonomous vehicle “Tommy”. After a few quick commands, Tommy was launched and achieved a land speed record at the time for fully autonomous travel. Tommy drove a course through the desert at a clip greater than 80 mph completely on its own.

Since those early pioneering days, Perrone Robotics has continued to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible with autonomous driving. After a few short years in R&D mode developing the foundation for their full-stack autonomy software platform “MAX”, in 2008 the Company set out to begin commercial deployments of MAX operating in a wide variety of vehicle types and in 24x7 industrial applications. After a 2016 investment led by Intel Capital, the Company expanded and began a series of strategic projects in the automotive and industrial space working with Fortune 500 companies, automotive OEMs, and tier 1 suppliers.

By 2018, the Company had perfected a “drop-in any vehicle” retrofit kit approach to autonomy that we began bringing to market in the deployment of fully autonomous shuttles and vehicles for transit of people & goods. We called this kit “TONY”, short for “TO Navigate You” and established the world’s first fully autonomous shuttle solution to operate on public roads with Level 5 autonomous capability. Today, Perrone Robotics is engaged with a number of visionary customers and partners bringing autonomous operations into production use with TONY. We are pleased to be bringing our turn-key TONY shuttles and TONY retrofit kit with new vehicles to market and into production for the proliferation of autonomous transit NOW.