Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
The company has been mapping Los Angeles using human drivers since 2019. Next, a spokesman said, trained drivers will test out Waymo’s robot taxi service on L.A.-area highways and neighborhood thoroughfares, with runs downtown, along the Miracle Mile and in Koreatown, Santa Monica and West Hollywood. — LA Times
Waymo has already eked out footholds in Phoenix and San Francisco and will need a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand its West Coast operations into what it says is a now $2 billion market. The Public Utilities hurdle and technically complicated mapping process aside... View full entry
Alphabet’s self-driving car company Waymo is partnering with Chinese automaker Geely to create a fleet of all-electric, self-driving robotaxis. — The Verge
The cars will be designed in Sweden, where Geely owns Swedish car manufacturer Volvo. Waymo will integrate the Waymo Driver, their autonomous driving technology, into Geely's electric, transportation-as-a-service (Taas)-optimized Zeekr vehicle. Waymo plans to deploy the vehicles in the US within... View full entry
A venture firm and a major taxi company began trials of passenger-carrying autonomous taxi services on Monday with an eye on launching the full service around 2020 when Tokyo hosts the Olympics and the Paralympics.
ZMP Inc., a Tokyo-based developer of autonomous driving technology, and Hinomaru Kotsu Co., said they are the first in the world to offer autonomous taxi services to fare-paying passengers in the test through Sept. 8.
— Japan Times
Other tech companies and automakers have also been testing autonomous driving services in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. If the Tokyo RoboCar MiniVan trial is successful, officials hope to scale up the program to assist with the increased transportation demand during the 2020 Summer Olympics and... View full entry
Airbus appears to be serious about its "Vahana" project, aimed at creating an autonomous passenger drone network, and thinks testing can begin as early as 2017. [...]
Airbus is also working on a drone delivery service [...] and plans to start testing it at a Singapore university by mid-2017. The cargo-laden vehicles fly automated routes in "aerial corridors," then drop them off and send delivery notifications to customers.
— Engadget
Airbus engineers are dreaming up no small endeavor as laid out in the company's Future of Urban Mobility vision: "Imagine landing at a major international airport after a long flight in an A380. Instead of suffering through a 90-minute taxi ride in the megacity’s gridlocked traffic, you hop into... View full entry
Tokyo-based Robot Taxi ... is still on track to start field tests of its driverless taxi service in one region of Japan by the end of next March [...]
The company, a joint venture between DeNA (one of Japan’s mobile internet pioneers) and ZMP (a robotics firm; tagline “Robot of Everything”) is not building its own cars from scratch. Instead, it’s focusing on adding driverless capabilities to existing cars and designing, creating, and marketing the taxi service.
— qz.com
More on the lead-up to Toky's 2020 Olympic Games: Zaha Hadid ineligible to participate in Tokyo Stadium design-build competitionJapanese government hopes to cap Olympic stadium costs at US$1.28 billionZaha's Tokyo Olympic Stadium cancelled – Abe calls for a redesign from scratch View full entry