Tier IV to hold open-source autonomous driving event at Miraikan

Tier IV announced on September 25, 2026, that it will hold an experiential event on “open-source autonomous driving” at Miraikan on Saturday, September 26, 2026. Primarily aimed at junior high and high school students, the event will offer three programs: AI robots, an autonomous driving simulator and an AIRC car. The venue will be the Hub Space on the third floor of Miraikan and other areas. Miraikan is the organizer, with Tier IV as co-organizer.

Tier IV positions the event as part of efforts to expand the open-source ecosystem centered on Autoware and develop the next generation of talent. By making autonomous driving accessible as a hands-on experience for junior high and high school students, not just developers, the company aims to broaden the entry point to the technology.

What is new in this announcement is that Tier IV is bringing its explanation of autonomous driving technology to Miraikan as an experiential program for junior high and high school students, rather than limiting it to researchers and developers. The open-source approach centered on Autoware, however, continues the company’s established direction; the move appears to extend its existing philosophy into education and science communication. The event’s three components—AI robots, a simulator using a GPU environment and an AIRC car—connect learning, virtual driving and a demonstration using a physical vehicle. In our related coverage, Tier IV outlined its thinking on development platforms in the September 18 article Nikkei Business reports Tier IV CEO Kato called for democratizing autonomous driving through an open-source platform, and on September 24 it released a reference design for an autonomous driving system for racing karts. The Miraikan event can be seen as a move to broaden understanding at the entry level, alongside efforts to present the technology through physical implementations. The materials released for this event do not, however, explain the relative emphasis on education and product businesses or the scope of Autoware adoption the company envisages. From an industry perspective, the event is significant because it presents autonomous driving as a combination of not only “vehicles that drive,” but also “learning materials,” “computing environments that use GPUs” and “experiential equipment.” The question is how far barriers to entry can be lowered by making development environments easier to share, in addition to learning data and algorithms, with Autoware at the center. At the same time, what is truly needed for real-world deployment is not the response to an educational event, but a sustained supply of development talent, the conditions for moving from simulation to physical vehicles, and the extent to which individual developments such as the AIRC car can be reused. See the original source for details.

In Japan, public facilities such as Miraikan could provide a link between education and development by offering hands-on experiences with open-source platforms such as Autoware. If the pool of people able to work with computing environments for autonomous driving, or with development that bridges simulators and physical vehicles, is limited, the impact of public events like this could be constrained.