Driverless Taxi in Singapore
Singapore introduced the World’s first Driverless taxi service on Thursday, beating giant Uber Technologies Incorporated by mere days to public road tests of a technology that could transform the transport industry.
Although, the trial is small, demonstrates how the global race has become powerful to develop autonomous driving vehicles. The field was usually dominated by U.S. tech giants such as Alphabet and Uber Inc.’s Google.
Singapore’s nuTonomy, which is driverless taxi has founded by the researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of technology, said it started testing a free taxi-hailing service in a small district of Singapore called one-north, a campus-like tech-dominated by biotechnology and tech firm companies. Other tech companies such as Chinese internet giantBaidu incorporated has been testing for many years, but for the first time, the vehicles came into public use.
Thursday the Singapore government has given the approval for the trial, which has long hunting to change the city-state into a hub for troublesome technology by liberal financial assistance programs and research partnerships with firms like nuTonomy.
Doug Parker, who was a chief operating officer of nuTonomy said in an interview “Quite openly I think Uber is the giant and we need show that our technology is working and got maturity that is feasible for the market place.” on Thursday. “We’re in a technology race here and I think there are going to be a handful of winners.”
Nutonomy’s tested the vehicles featuring Toyota parts, as well as Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car (one day those may be designed like some Devel Sixteen, hopefully); those will have a computer engineer and if anything goes wrong in any case they backup human driver, and can be hailed by choosing how many people are using a smartphone app, the company said. In Singapore, the one-north district is a self-contained 0.8 square miles of area available by trunk roads but quieter than other public roads in Singapore.
Mr.Parker said that before it is permitted to extend its trials to other areas of the city, the Singapore government has placed a number of milestones for nuTonomy to achieve. He refused to provide details on those milestones but said the next stage may expand the service to neighbourhood adjacent to one-north.
Mr. Parker said that “We are placing a strong bet that Singapore is going to be the first country in the world to offer a consumer service” on a national scale, and also said the nuTonomy goal is to get an island-wide autonomous taxi service as soon as 2018.
Though the size of Singapore is small and due to its tight control over road networks has made the Singapore a strong contender, compared to the likes of Google, Tesla Motors and Uber Inc, the nuTonomy is far behind in funding and publicity. Uber said earlier this month it will begin trials of its own self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh by the end of August and targets as many as 100 vehicles in the coming months.
Compared to the one-north district of Singapore the city of Pittsburgh is relatively larger and it allows Uber to gather more information to update its technology than its Singapore-based rival. Already the Uber contains above 1.5 million active drivers all over the world providing ride-hailing taxi services.
Other firms, particularly Alphabet’s Google, have previously regulated millions of miles on public roads with their autonomous vehicles.
For many of these firms, the directive is the greatest challenge.Compared to human drivers Autonomous vehicles are sold safer and they are more reliable than human drivers,but most of the people say they don’t trust machines due to they are unable to make moral or inborn decisions like a human does. Some industry observers say due to these reasons autonomous driving technologies are years away from public use.
There have been some high-profile accidents involving autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, such as a fatal one earlier this year in Florida involving Tesla’s driver assistance software.
NuTonomy’s Mr. Parker said one of the trial’s goals is to introduce the public to the new technology. “We don’t want it to be scary,” he said.This is the description about Singapore Driverless taxi
