Skip to main content

Lyft’s driverless cars are back on the streets of California

 

Lyft’s driverless cars are back on the streets of California.

Recommended Videos

The ridesharing company suspended testing of its autonomous vehicles earlier this year in response to shelter-in-place orders prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.

But with COVID-19 cases on the rise in California, it’s possible Lyft’s current testing session, taking place in Palo Alto, may be short-lived. Still, while it continues, the company insists it’s taking the proper precautions to ensure the safety of the engineers that sit inside the robot cars as they navigate the streets, according to TechCrunch.

Working in pairs, each engineer has to wear a face shield and take regular temperature checks. A physical partition has also been placed inside its driverless cars to separate the two engineers. Surfaces inside the vehicle are regularly sanitized, too.

As its name suggests, Lyft’s Level 5 program is geared toward testing technology that will allow a vehicle to drive itself without any human input. Created by the Society of Automotive Engineers, the internationally recognized rating system is made up of six categories, with Level 0 offering no autonomy, and Level 5 full autonomy.

Lyft started testing autonomous vehicles in California in November 2018 with a view to one day offering rides to customers in driverless cars. While it currently operates 19 self-driving vehicles, the company told Digital Trends that right now “less than 10” of these are on the road. In addition, Lyft had started to offer rides to employees as part of its testing program, but while COVID-19 remains an issue, only engineers will ride inside the cars.

Lyft said in a blog post on Tuesday that while its cars were off the road earlier this year, its team had been able to continue its work developing the technology using simulation software that can create specific scenarios to test the driverless system.

“Testing [autonomous vehicles] in the real world is necessary, but can also be limiting,” the company said. “Training inputs like weather and pedestrian behavior are limited to what’s happening in the world at each moment, and it can be unpredictable when you encounter a rare obstacle a second time. If reliant upon on-road miles, it may take some number of billions of miles to test everything. Simply put, the scale makes it impractical to rely only on-road miles.”

It added that simulation is cost-effective and also allows engineers to test the technology “without vehicles, without leaving our desks, and for the last few months, without leaving our homes.”

Waymo, one of the biggest players in the field of autonomous vehicles, returned its self-driving minivans to the streets of San Francisco in June, three months after it halted testing. And, like Lyft, Waymo has also been keen to talk about how, despite the suspension of on-road testing, it continued developing its technology through the use of simulation software.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Waymo’s robotaxis are rolling into another U.S. city
A Waymo driverless car.

Waymo has been testing its driverless cars in Miami intermittently for the last five years, but now it’s making serious moves to launch a robotaxi service there.

The Alphabet-owned company revealed on Thursday that it’ll start testing its Jaguar I-PACE autonomous cars on the streets of the city early next year, with the aim of launching a robotaxi service for residents and visitors via the Waymo One app in 2026.

Read more
Now anyone in LA can take Waymo robotaxi rides 24/7
A Waymo robotaxi picking up a passenger.

It just got much easier to take a robotaxi ride in Los Angeles. Waymo announced on Tuesday that anyone in the California city can now take fully autonomous rides, removing the need to join a wait list.

Alphabet-owned Waymo started offering paid robotaxi rides in Los Angeles earlier this year via its Waymo One app, but strong demand resulted in a wait list of nearly 300,000 people wanting to join the service.

Read more
Waymo, Nexar present AI-based study to protect ‘vulnerable’ road users
waymo data vulnerable road users ml still  1 ea18c3

Robotaxi operator Waymo says its partnership with Nexar, a machine-learning tech firm dedicated to improving road safety, has yielded the largest dataset of its kind in the U.S., which will help inform the driving of its own automated vehicles.

As part of its latest research with Nexar, Waymo has reconstructed hundreds of crashes involving what it calls ‘vulnerable road users’ (VRUs), such as pedestrians walking through crosswalks, biyclists in city streets, or high-speed motorcycle riders on highways.

Read more