Perrone Robotics

Perrone Robotics, Inc. is an autonomous vehicle technology company headquartered at 1000 Research Park Boulevard, Suite 106, Charlottesville, Virginia 22911. The company was founded by Paul Perrone, who led a team in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge semi-finals and invented the MAX (Mobile Autonomous eXecutive) robotics operating system, patented in the US in 2006 as the first general-purpose autonomy OS for vehicles.

Perrone Robotics' primary commercial product is the TONY (TO Navigate You) autonomous vehicle kit, a vehicle-agnostic retrofit package enabling Level 4 autonomous operation within geo-fenced environments. TONY has been validated on more than 30 vehicle types and has accumulated hundreds of thousands of autonomous miles. The kit integrates sensor fusion, localization, path planning, and control modules compatible with diverse vehicle architectures. Perrone Robotics offers TONY in two configurations: the TONY AV Kit (full autonomy retrofit) and the TONY ADAS Kit (advanced driver assistance).

The company also supplies complete turnkey autonomous passenger shuttles and cargo AVs, including a collaboration with GreenPower Motor Company on the AV Star, described as the first fully autonomous, zero-emission, Buy America-compliant, ADA-compliant, FMVSS-certified shuttle deployed on public roads in 2020.

Key deployment milestones include: first fully autonomous public road shuttle (2019); public road operations in multiple US states (2021-present); contracts with Houston METRO, Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA), and CapMetro (Austin, TX) (2022-present); first autonomous shuttle deployments in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (2023); Detroit CONNECT autonomous transit program (2024, one of the longest continuous US AV deployments); autonomous transit on Ford E-Transit platforms (2024-2025); first autonomous law enforcement patrol vehicle with Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office (2025). Intel Capital has invested in the company. Phone: +1 434-260-8550.