This also marks the first time a fully autonomous vehicle is made available to the public, proving Uber’s determination to have a proper self-driven fleet of vehicles providing their services. Uber places a limit because an engineer will take up the front seat to assess how the vehicle is handling everything.
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Engineers spent almost 18 months in Uber’s “Advanced Technologies Lab” in Pittsburgh with the goal of making the self-driving Uber a reality, said a company spokesperson. Driver less fleet will make Uber much more scale able and automated while reducing liabilities associated with the actions of reckless drivers.
Media correspondents and Uber customers have said that, overall, the experience of hailing a driverless taxi has been a first approach to what the future could be like.
The most important task that computers will perform in the next 10 years will be to drive vehicles, Uber vice president for self-driving technology Anthony Levandowski said.
But Aaron Steinfeld from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon says the time has come to truly test the technology.
The Uber cars use seven traffic-light detecting cameras, a radar system for detecting different weather conditions and 20 spinning lasers which generate a continuous, 360-degree 3-D map of the surrounding environment. The goal, Uber executives said, is to make zero interventions, and have no technician along for the ride. “But I think a product that’s well tested and it’s proven to work and safe – I think that’s where we’re heading, and I think I’ll eventually find myself in a driverless vehicle”.
“There’s no requirement that you be touching the steering wheel”, said Kurt J. Myers, deputy secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Uber’s landscape is the whole of Pittsburgh, a major United States city with very steep hills, old narrow streets and multiple bridges and highways built through the middle.
Public confidence in self-driving cars and autopilot features recently took a hit after a string of accidents involving Tesla’s Model S and X cars.
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It wasn’t that long ago that there were no Ubers on the road. Each auto will have a driver sitting up front ready to grab the wheel if needed.
