Uber has recently annouced that it is about to restart its self driving cars test on the streets of Toronto. According to Uber it has modified its self driving cars from the way was before. The test was stopped after one of its autonomous car hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona during the street test.
The company said on Thursday that the they will start testing a limited vehicles in Toronto area and the cars will have a driver in control at all times and also include a second operator as a precaution.
Raquel Urtasun, chief scientist at Uber Advanced Technologies Group said in an interview that since after the incident Uber has reviewed safety measures all over including at the research group.
“Since the tragic incident, ATG has been working and has been really looking at all of our processes and the way we develop the technology” she added.
Raquel said safety comes first and the company has looked to emphasize more simulations in autonomous development.
“We have revamped all our offline testing such that we minimize the need for tests on the roads, and instead we leverage all of our data collection processes and we can test and create simulations so that we minimize the risks until the technology is ready.” she added
According to Raquel “Toronto testing will focus on development and data collection for the company AI systems including map building, more so than testing the real world self-driving capabilities of the vehicles.
Now self-driving vehicles require a high definition road maps to operate and supplement the various on-board sensors. The company said in it’s statement that it is working to build technology that will allow map building in real-time to speed up the mapping process.
Uber also says it is also restarting its autonomous car test in Pittsburgh, where vehicles will be operated in a fully autonomous mode with two safety operators.
Uber also said that it is panning to move its ATG research and development hub a couple kilometres west from its current base in Toronto’s MARS Discovery District tech hub as it plans to double the size of its AI research team to 100 next year.
