The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a formal safety probe Monday into Tesla’s driver assistance system, Autopilot, after identifying 11 crashes involving Tesla cars and first responder scenes since 2018. The NHTSA reported 17 injuries and one death resulting from the crashes. A 2017 NHTSA investigation into Autopilot concluded without any action, but this […]

Each year the Business Record gets the pulse on key issues affecting the region’s business community from our audience. Our annual survey asks business leaders to share what they feel are some of the top issues affecting business in Central Iowa, and in particular the Greater Des Moines region.  Below, we’ve published a glimpse of what […]

 A popular data set used by thousands of students to build an open-source self driving car contains hundreds of instances of critical errors and omissions, wrote Roboflow cofounder Brad Dwyer in a company blog. “We did a hand-check of the 15,000 images in the widely used Udacity Dataset 2 and found problems with 4,986 (33%) […]

Each year the Business Record gets the pulse on key issues affecting the region’s business community from our audience. Back in October we reached out, and Des Moines leaders delivered. Catch a glimpse of what people thought about artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles in Des Moines and cybersecurity below, and look for the Business Record’s annual […]

The Ames-based autonomous farming platform Smart Ag has been acquired by Raven Industries, a Sioux Falls-based industrial company with the precision agriculture division Raven Applied Technology. The acquisition falls under the newly-established Raven Autonomy, the company’s strategic growth platform for autonomous agriculture solutions announced on Oct. 28. Smart Ag launched in 2015 and is most […]

Smart Ag, the startup developing autonomous farming equipment platforms, has opened its new headquarters at 1115 South Bell Avenue in Ames. The new facility has half of its 12,000 square feet devoted to office space for its current 25 employees, while the other half is designated for research, development and manufacturing. Previously located at the […]

Iowa City leaders do not want to be caught off-guard the day autonomous vehicles become mainstream – and the city is tapping a team of University of Iowa graduate students to begin assessing the area’s needs, reports the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Iowa City Mayor Jim Throgmorton said the city put in a request with the […]

In 2013, the Business Record launched innovationIOWA Magazine, an annual publication with a mission to spotlight innovative companies and technological achievements across the state. One year ago this week, our newsroom launched the innovationIOWA e-newsletter, updating our delivery from annually to weekly – right to your inbox. The mission remains the same: we seek out […]

Deere & Company’s Intelligent Solutions Group is launching a new startup collaboration program to build relationships with tech companies seeking to reach John Deere customers. The Startup Collaborator is a partnership initiative to allow Deere and startup companies to test new technologies with customers and dealers, without a more formal business relationship, Deere & Company […]

Less than two years after being named one of 10 automated vehicle proving grounds in the nation, the Corridor and University of Iowa’s National Advanced Driving Simulator and nine other entities have all lost the designation, reports the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The U.S. Department of Transportation is withdrawing the 2017 designations under its latest automated […]