Self-driving taxis are making their first steps in Russia with a new experiment led in Innopolis, a brand new tech city under completion on the outskirts of Kazan, 800 km eastwards from Moscow.
In just two months, from Aug. 25 to Oct. 28, 1,000 autonomous rides with passengers were completed, claims Yandex.Taxi, the company behind the experiment.
“On an average day, our self-driving service in Innopolis makes about 20 trips and the average duration of each trip is 10 minutes,” the company stated.
This real-life experiment aimed to refine the service with rider feedback.
“It’s very impressive that a machine comes so quickly and manages all the driving maneuvers itself. It’s almost like a perfect driver is behind the wheel,” a student having used the service many times was quoted as saying.
Yandex.Taxi has presented its experiment in Innopolis as “the launch of the first autonomous ride-hailing service in a European city.”
Computing algorithms in the snow
The Yandex.Taxi self-driving vehicle was unveiled in May 2017. The car incorporates Yandex’s own technologies, such as mapping, real-time navigation, computer vision and object recognition. The company’s proprietary computing algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning “ensure the vehicle’s ability to ‘make decisions’ in complex environments, such as busy city traffic,” the company explained at that time.
The “fully-fledged autopilot functionality” of this car is described as Level 5, according to the international classification system for automated vehicles. (In this system, Level 0 means that a person has full control over the vehicle, and Level 5 involves no human intervention.)
In November 2017, these self-driving vehicles were unleashed on the snow-covered roads of the Moscow region. Yandex.Taxi wanted to check how their automatic cars fare during the winter when snow can obscure road markings, making it hard for the vehicle’s cameras to navigate.
Yandex.Taxi is the leading taxi-hailing service in Russia with a nearly 50% market share, according to a UBS report released in September 2018. A subsidiary of Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian search giant, the company merged activities in Russia and some neighboring countries earlier this year with Uber.
