Singapore will become one of the first countries in the world
that will operate driverless taxi. It can happen thanks to the development
that's done by nuTonomy.
nuTonomy was started from a simple project which was done by
two scientists of MIT, Karl Iagnemma and Emilio Frazzoli. In 2009, they
developed a driverless golf car. And then in 2013, nuTonomy stood as a company
that's engaged in automatic steering software.
Now nuTonomy's driverless taxi has just successfully
completed its first test, where the driverless taxi was assigned to complete
the route with a number of obstacles, of course, without a single incident.
Although it's born from a university, nuTonomy had a pretty
good background in the automotive industry. One of them was when it worked with
Jaguar Land Rover, where nuTonomy was assigned to design an automatic parking
system.
With the success of the test performed, nuTonomy is now
awaiting for approval from the government to test its driverless taxi in the
business district One North that's specifically designed to test the
self-steering car.
nuTonomy uses an electric car, which means there will be no
carbon emissions. It also has the potential to make electric cars market
becomes more mainstream because there will be more battery recharging stations
that are built in strategic spots.
nuTonomy uses a variety of sensors in its automatic steering
system, ranging from LIDAR to detect objects and also three dimensional
mapping. This is crucial because the traffic condition in Singapore is quite
dense.
In the next few years, nuTonomy hopes to operate thousands
of driverless taxis in Singapore. nuTonomy doesn't want to 'kill' the job field
of conventional taxi drivers, but this driverless taxi could be a complementary
for the taxi service to meet the consumer needs.