Here’s how central Silicon Valley has become to the development of autonomous cars: The latest self-driving startup to open an office in the region hails from Hungary.

AImotive, based in Budapest, has set up shop in Mountain View to test its self-driving technology and work with its partners, some of which are headquartered in the valley.

Formerly known as AdasWorks, AImotive specializes in artificial intelligence software that will enable a car to understand and respond to the environment around it, including other cars and pedestrians. Unlike many of its competitors, AImotive’s software relies mostly on data from cameras, rather than radar, lidar and 3-D maps.

That should make the system significantly cheaper and more flexible than other versions of self-driving technology, said CEO and founder Laszlo Kishonti.

“It’s based on visual cues,” he said. “We want to replicate how the human operates the vehicle.”

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The system is hardware agnostic, capable of working with cameras and computer chips from a number of suppliers. AImotive has, however, received funding from Santa Clara chipmaker Nvidia and is working with Nvidia on a self-driving technology project for Volvo.

The company has raised $10.5 million to date, from investors that also include Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Inventure, Draper Associates, Day One Capital Fund Management and the Tamares Group.

AImotive joins an increasingly crowded field of traditional automakers such as Ford, tech giants including Google and lesser-known startups developing self-driving vehicles in the Bay Area. Google’s autonomous SUVs have been logging miles on the Peninsula for years, while both General Motors and Uber are now testing their versions of the technology on San Francisco streets.

AImotive’s engineers do not yet have permission from California officials to start experimenting with their vehicles on public roads, Kishonti said. But that is part of the reason they’re here. The company would also like to establish satellite offices in China and Japan, two countries that have expressed keen interest in self-driving technology.

“To make this a super-reliable product, we need to open these offices and test, test, test,” he said.

AImotive was founded in 2015, spinning out of an earlier tech company Kishonti founded that bears his family name. The startup first tried its technology on a Mercedes-Benz C-Class, driving laps around a racetrack. Now it needs more challenging, real-world environments. The Mountain View office will use an adapted Toyota Prius for its tests.

Although Kishonti wanted a presence in the Bay Area, his company will keep its headquarters and most of its 120 people in Budapest. The local office will probably employ eight people, he said.

While cameras cost less, many companies working on autonomous driving lean more heavily on lidar, which functions much like radar but uses laser light instead of sound, or radar. Each has advantages, but lidar and radar are better at distinguishing objects from images, said Nidhi Kalra, director of the Rand Corp. Center for Decision Making Under Uncertainty.

“It can be difficult for cameras to tell if what they see ahead of them is really there, or if it’s a picture of something — lidar tells you what is really there,” she said. “If you only have cameras, they all have the same vulnerabilities. So you want a mix of sensors.”

Kishonti said AImotive’s system may use radar as a backup. He’d be happy to use lidar if the price comes down. And the system’s artificial intelligence, he said, is capable of handling even the unexpected.

“If it sees an elephant — which we didn’t train it to see, why would we train it to see an elephant? — it will recognize it as a body on the road,” Kishonti said. “What we want to show here is the car understands everything around it, all the objects.”

David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DavidBakerSF