“Yandex. Taxi "demonstrated its first robotic

The division of the domestic search engine “Yandex.Taxi” has been developing robotic vehicles for about a year. Yesterday the finished roboMob was first demonstrated by the company. And although this is only a test version, she showed herself just fine. And since there is a prototype, then we can assume that Yandex is not only actively working to create a software and hardware platform for launching robots on the roads, but also successfully copes with this task.



Representatives of the company said that almost all the services that were used to create a robotic car, also the development of “Yandex”. First of all, we are talking about Yandex.Navigator and Yandex.Maps, writes Techcrunch. Developers say that now a self-driving car can make “difficult decisions” while driving on public roads.



“We use anonymized data that we get from users of the Yandex.Navigator service, which helps us understand how a car should behave on roads under various conditions, including speed limits, traffic jams and other things,” said a Yandex.Taxi representative. »Vladimir Isaev. “We have been using computer vision technology for some time to operate our services. Basically, they are used to search for free parking spaces or to identify traffic signs. ”



The same technologies help the Yandex search service to look for similar images, as well as recognize text from photos, translating it into other languages. As a result of the combined efforts of the developers, Yandex managed to create its own mobile robot.





By the way, on the demo version of this vehicle you can see the Velodyne LiDAR lidar, plus the Nvidia GTX GPU in the car. Representatives of the company claim that Yandex works with custom hardware, and standard devices and components are used. Now the leadership of the domestic company is negotiating with partners. The goal of the negotiations is to produce our own electronic devices and components for ro-mobiles.



At the moment, the domestic car with a computer control system is not allowed on public roads. But Yandex believes that this will happen within a year. The goal of the project itself is the creation of truly reliable commercial versions of domestic ro-mobiles and the establishment of their production. On the start of the project to create machines of this type, the company announced in September last year. Uber, Google, Tesla and Volvo are now involved in similar projects.