The first ever self-driving taxis available to the public have started picking up passengers in Singapore.
NuTonomy launched a self–driving taxi service in Singapore that the public can use, beating other major companies to market.
Startup NuTonomy wants to make it possible for users to hail driverless cars by phone, and it’s starting in Singapore.
The MIT startup’s driverless taxi passed its first driving test in Singapore last week, which consisted of navigating the vehicle autonomously through an obstacle course. The company will now continue testing cars in a business district of Singapore and plans to debut thousands of driverless taxis in the city over the next few years.
An exciting “driverless race” is underway among tech giants the United States: In recent months, Google, Uber, and Tesla have made headlines for developing self-driving taxis for big cities.
But a comparatively small MIT spinout, nuTonomy, has entered the race somewhat under the radar. The startup is developing a fleet of driverless taxis to serve as a more convenient form of public transit while helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the densely populated city-state of Singapore.
“This could make car-sharing something that is almost as convenient as having your own private car, but with the accessibility and cost of public transit,” says nuTonomy co-founder and chief technology officer Emilio Frazzoli, an MIT professor of aeronautical and astronautical engineering.
The startup’s driverless taxis follow optimal paths for picking up and dropping off passengers to reduce traffic congestion. Without the need to pay drivers, they should be cheaper than Uber and taxis. These are also electric cars, manufactured through partnerships with automakers, which produce lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions than conventional vehicles do.
Last week, nuTonomy “passed [its] first driving test” in Singapore, Frazzoli says — meaning its driverless taxis navigated a custom obstacle course, without incident. Now, nuTonomy is in the process of getting approval for on-road testing in a business district, called One North, designated for autonomous-vehicle testing. In a few years, Frazzoli says, nuTonomy aims to deploy thousands of driverless taxis in Singapore. The company will act as the service provider to maintain the vehicles and determine when and how they can be operated safely.
NuTonomy implements fleet management technology based on algorithms the US military uses for drone coordination, which the company said would help to reduce traffic and carbon emissions by making cars more efficient. Fazzoli and his colleagues published a study in Road Vehicle Automation in 2014 estimating 300,000 driverless taxis could replace the current number of taxis 780,000 while keeping wait time under 15 minutes.
http://nutonomy.com/