Autonomous Taxi Service Snuber Already Operating
All the buzz about autonomous driving is happening in Las Vegas at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, with players like NVIDIA, Ford, Tesla, Kia etc talking up the future. Even General Motors have committed $500 million to Lyft, a ride-hailing company, to work on self-driving cars.
But while it’s all shock and awe in Vegas, a South Korean university have been running a driver-less taxi service on its campus for the past six months.
The Seoul National University (SNU) have been testing the autonomous taxi service called Snuber to transport disabled students around the 4,109 square meter campus. Hailed via an app like a regular ride service, the run has thus far been accident-free.
The grey taxi has a massive turret equipped with a Genesis camera, laser scanners and other sensors to scan road conditions. Because of current regulations, a driver has to sit behind the wheel to handle emergency situations. The car’s speed is also capped at 30km/h due to the campus speed limit; there are also no traffic lights to contend with.
However, the taxi is programmed to tackle a variety of traffic conditions such as stopping at a stop sign or pedestrian crossing. Also, if it detects a stopped vehicle on the road, it will scan the other lanes and overtakes if there’s no oncoming traffic.
As Snuber is being tested in a rather controlled environment on campus, it won’t be real-world-ready for quite a while. “It will take a huge amount of effort. We need more tests in real traffic conditions”, said Seo Seung-Woo, director of the Intelligent Vehicle IT Research Center at SNU, who expects to see driver-less cars by 2020.
South Korean companies haven’t been quick on the dime to embark on autonomous driving technology. Hyundai Motor Co. doesn’t expect to have an autonomous car until 2030 and Samsung Electronics only recently established a team look into this.
However, Robot Taxi Inc. in Japan has already planned to offer a full commercial service by 2020 while Greece has already tested an autonomous bus called CityMobil2 in real traffic.
But driver-less vehicles shouldn’t just be for transporting people; there’s a huge potential for it in the logistics industry not unlike the robot transporters puttering around car assembly plants or the delivery drones dreamed up by Amazon. We love cargo trucks that don’t break the speed limit, don’t we?
