How I rode an unmanned taxi
Greetings to all readers of our blog! My name is Edward, at RDTEX I lead the Center for Solutions for Industry, but today my post is not about that.
I want to share the experience of testing an unmanned taxi from Yandex. Such an event presented itself to me during the TsIPR-2019 conference, which took place last week in Innopolis (Tatarstan).
My colleague and I were able to test a model of the future unmanned taxi. The drone is built on the basis of the Toyota Prius (in my opinion, this model in itself has the potential for futuristic experiments), and inside and out it looks like a modern reliable car, so there was no nervousness from the fact that the driver’s seat was empty. Since it is still forbidden to operate the car completely without supervision, a test instructor sat on the passenger seat, which, it should be noted, almost did not interfere with the operation of the equipment.
The trip itself was short-lived, around 10 minutes. During this time, it was possible to observe the drone's reactions to the appearance of interference in the form of a 99 Lada model and a pedestrian on a scooter. In both cases, the car reacted ahead of the curve, that is, it tried to predict the worst-case scenarios of the other participants' trajectories, namely, it slowed down and missed.
In truth, if I myself were driving, I would not have paid attention to these obstacles, since we did not carry threats to each other. But this is my driver experience and intuition, and the autopilot uses only algorithms and probabilities.
In conclusion, we can conclude that the unmanned taxi still needs to be improved in terms of software, but we can say with confidence that the future that we saw in science fiction films is already on the verge.
I want to share the experience of testing an unmanned taxi from Yandex. Such an event presented itself to me during the TsIPR-2019 conference, which took place last week in Innopolis (Tatarstan).
My colleague and I were able to test a model of the future unmanned taxi. The drone is built on the basis of the Toyota Prius (in my opinion, this model in itself has the potential for futuristic experiments), and inside and out it looks like a modern reliable car, so there was no nervousness from the fact that the driver’s seat was empty. Since it is still forbidden to operate the car completely without supervision, a test instructor sat on the passenger seat, which, it should be noted, almost did not interfere with the operation of the equipment.
The trip itself was short-lived, around 10 minutes. During this time, it was possible to observe the drone's reactions to the appearance of interference in the form of a 99 Lada model and a pedestrian on a scooter. In both cases, the car reacted ahead of the curve, that is, it tried to predict the worst-case scenarios of the other participants' trajectories, namely, it slowed down and missed.
In truth, if I myself were driving, I would not have paid attention to these obstacles, since we did not carry threats to each other. But this is my driver experience and intuition, and the autopilot uses only algorithms and probabilities.
In conclusion, we can conclude that the unmanned taxi still needs to be improved in terms of software, but we can say with confidence that the future that we saw in science fiction films is already on the verge.