Tokyo – October 14, 2026 -- Taisei Corporation, TIER IV, Inc. and Taisei Rotec Corporation have been selected by Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) for a FY2026 demonstration project to accelerate deployment of the Autoflow Road, a logistics system that moves cargo with unmanned, automated vehicles in purpose-built lanes.
Three autonomous vehicles will test core multi-vehicle maneuvers in tunnels
The trial will evaluate platooning, bidirectional driving, lane changes, merging and diverging, and obstacle avoidance in tunnel environments and other dedicated space. Three autonomous vehicles will run on straight and curved sections.
The project will verify following, stopping, passing oncoming vehicles, merging and diverging, obstacle avoidance and berth stopping accuracy. It will also measure the driving space widths required, defined as standard, intermediate and minimum.
The test vehicles are passenger-car-based and serve testing purposes only. They do not represent the final dedicated transport hardware for the Autoflow Road.
Sensor and roadside infrastructure simplification is a core test objective
The companies will test ways to simplify automotive sensors and roadside infrastructure optimized for dedicated lanes. They will also validate T-Localizer®, Taisei Corporation's self-localization support technology.
The demonstration will further assess the adaptability and scalability of Pilot.Auto, TIER IV's autonomous driving system for logistics applications.
FY2025 trials confirmed potential feasibility but exposed operational challenges
Taisei Corporation developed T-Localizer® and T-iPower® Road, a dynamic wireless power transfer system. Taisei Rotec Corporation developed tunnel surface coatings engineered to enhance vehicle LiDAR perception in GPS-denied environments. TIER IV supplied an autonomous vehicle equipped with Autoware.
In MLIT's FY2025 demonstration project, the companies ran trials with the TIER IV vehicle and T-Localizer® alongside T-iPower® Road. The results confirmed the potential applicability and feasibility of the technologies for the Autoflow Road and identified operational challenges, which the source does not detail.
The FY2026 project builds on that work by evaluating multi-vehicle operations and a streamlined sensor layout and roadside infrastructure. According to the companies, the findings will clarify the respective roles of vehicle autonomy and road infrastructure, laying the foundation for a lean and scalable Autoflow Road deployment.