Taisei, TIER IV, Taisei Rotec Selected for Japan Autoflow Road Trials

Taisei Corporation, TIER IV, Inc., and Taisei Rotec Corporation said in a joint announcement on October 14, 2026 that they have been selected for a Japanese government project demonstrating the Autoflow Road, an automated logistics road system. The partners plan an eight-day, three-vehicle autonomous driving demonstration at a transport ministry research facility from late October to early November 2026.

The Autoflow Road Program

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) describes the Autoflow Road as a new logistics system that sets aside dedicated logistics space within road space and moves cargo using unmanned, automated transport powered by clean energy. The ministry ties the initiative to addressing the logistics crisis and achieving carbon neutrality.

The ministry’s Road Bureau publicly solicited operators for the fiscal 2026 demonstration experiment from July 22 to August 21, 2026, and announced the operator selections on September 8, 2026, stating it would next coordinate experiment plans with the selected operators. The companies’ October 14 announcement discloses the joint demonstration plan the team submitted to the ministry, covering automated operation of multiple transport devices and a simplification of the vehicle-mounted sensors and roadside infrastructure that autonomous driving requires inside a dedicated space.

Demonstration Plan and Company Roles

The announcement lists the demonstration theme as the verification of automated driving by multiple transport devices. Three autonomous vehicles will run over straight and curved sections to verify leading and following, following and stopping, oncoming passing, parallel running, passing stopped equipment, diverging and merging, avoidance and overtaking of assumed fallen objects, and the accuracy of stopping positions. The team will also confirm the driving space the Autoflow Road requires, including standard, intermediate, and minimum widths.

The work will take place at MLIT’s National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management, using the institute’s full-scale tunnel test facility and its test tracks, identified in the announcement as the East straight section and the South loop.

The three experimental vehicles are based on passenger cars. The announcement states they are being used to verify multi-vehicle autonomous driving systems and control functions, and notes that this is separate from the prototyping and selection of the future dedicated logistics transport equipment.

The autonomous driving system is Pilot.Auto, which TIER IV developed on Autoware, open-source software for autonomous driving. The companies said the demonstration will evaluate Pilot.Auto’s applicability and expandability and validate the effectiveness of T-Localizer, Taisei’s self-localization support technology.

Under the plan, Taisei is responsible for planning and executing the demonstration experiment, verifying the self-localization support technology and the simplification of autonomous driving equipment, and analyzing and evaluating the resulting data. TIER IV provides the autonomous vehicles and the driving system, supports the driving setup and the driving demonstration, and acquires and analyzes driving data. Taisei Rotec handles reflector installation planning, construction, and measurement, and provides support for the demonstration experiment.

The announcement notes that the demonstration contents and the company roles are current plans based on applications the companies submitted to MLIT.

Fiscal 2025 Trials and Next Steps

The companies said that in the fiscal 2025 round of the same MLIT program they ran demonstrations pairing T-Localizer-based autonomous driving support for a TIER IV vehicle with T-iPower Road, Taisei’s wireless power transfer technology capable of supplying power to moving vehicles. Those trials confirmed the feasibility of the approach and identified operational challenges.

MLIT’s fiscal 2025 program record, published on November 28, 2025, states that the ministry adopted operators for that round on September 19, 2025 and began the experiments on December 2, 2025. The record lists Taisei Corporation experiment slots on December 17–18, 2025 at the National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management and on January 6–16, 2026 at the company’s own facility.

The announcement also describes each partner’s technology line: Taisei has developed T-Localizer, an infrastructure technology that supports self-localization of autonomous vehicles, alongside the T-iPower Road wireless power transfer system; Taisei Rotec has developed coatings designed for easy recognition by vehicle-mounted LiDAR; and TIER IV supplies autonomous vehicles built on Autoware.

For fiscal 2026, the companies said the three partners will build on the fiscal 2025 results, verifying driving performance intended for multi-vehicle operation and examining how to rationalize and simplify the equipment autonomous driving requires by leveraging the characteristics of dedicated space. Based on the demonstration’s findings, they said they will organize the respective roles of vehicle-side autonomous driving functions and road infrastructure, study a rationalized and simplified system and infrastructure configuration suited to dedicated space, and work from both the vehicle and infrastructure sides toward a technology foundation for the social implementation of the Autoflow Road.