"Yandex" will test their roboomil in Israel
Yandex has received permission from the Israeli Ministry of Transport to test its unmanned vehicles on public roads. True, this will not be a completely unmanned journey - there will be an operator at the driver’s place who will monitor the autopilot’s work.
Robomobil will master the roads of Tel Aviv. So far, it is unclear whether Yandex can test several vehicles at once or it is all about one car. Israel was chosen for testing because the country's legislation allows testing of robomics on public roads.
In addition, the country has very different climatic conditions from Russia, so this is another opportunity to try out a robomobil for "durability". Plus, in Israel, a lot of companies that are engaged in the development of robots. Yandex will probably cooperate with some of them. One such company is Mobileye, which develops vehicle recognition systems without using lidars and radars.
In addition, this month Yandex launched its own taxi service in Israel. Perhaps the company will invite passengers to ride on cars with robotic controls.
In October, it was reportedthat the unmanned taxi "Yandex" began work on the territory of Skolkovo. They decided to divide the project into several stages. The first allows the use of machines with an unmanned system only for residents of the innovation center. Further, the range of passengers will be expanded, but this is only subject to the successful completion of the first stage of testing.
Work on the technology for an unmanned vehicle has been in progress since 2016, it uses various “Yandex” developments from areas such as machine learning, computer vision and navigation. In June 2017, the company conducted a closed unmanned vehicle test. Then, two prototypes took part in the test, each of which had sensors and specialized software installed. Sensors collect information about the condition of the vehicle and the environment, and specialized software determines how the machine should move after analyzing the information received from the sensors.