When this was originally published 18 months ago it did not have the importance that it does now. It looks like they are making real progress according to their website.
Well, the risk of failure in this driverless vehicle experiment seems to be significantly reduced as their will be no person in the vehicle and the cars will only be allowed in certain areas of San Jose, CA at much less than highway speeds. This one just might work.
AutoX is partnering with GrubMarket who sources local organic and healthy food to the San Jose area. AutoX uses only one low resolution lidar used for redundancy and to improve system robustness. The rest of the navigation is done with cameras.
“We’re very excited to launch the world’s first autonomous grocery delivery service with self-driving vehicles on the road,” said AutoX Founder and CEO Jianxiong Xiao, who has a Ph.D. from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and is a pioneer in the research field of 3D computer vision and robotics. “It’s the first step of our mission to democratize autonomy, also a testament to our cutting edge A.I. and all its potential capabilities. We believe self-driving car technologies will fundamentally change people’s daily lives for the better.”
AutoX has chosen the Lincoln MKZ for the test vehicles. They may be saving money by not using lidar, but the vehicle cost is going to make up for that and then some. However it turns out the MKZ is the preferred off the production line vehicle because of its built-in capability to be support drive by wire for the throttle, brake, steering and shift. To read more about this capability click here.
To read the entire article click here.
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