INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Uber Advanced Technologies Group has officially resumed on-road testing of its self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh, nine months after the
company halted its entire autonomous vehicle operation after one of its vehiclesstruck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in the Phoenix
suburb of Tempe.
The relaunch follows the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation decision to authorize Uber ATG to put its autonomous
vehicles on public roads.
It also marks a notable turnaround —at least so far — for a program that less than a year ago appeared
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, a proponent of autonomous-vehicle technology who invited Uber to the state, suspended the company from testing
its self-driving cars following the accident, the company let go all100 of its self-driving car operatorsin Pittsburgh and San Francisco,
and rumors circulated that the company wanted to sell its self-driving unit.
Now Uber is back, slowly wading back into thethe self-driving
And not just in Pittsburgh.Uber ATG head Eric Meyhofer said the company will resume manual driving in San Francisco and Toronto, a sign that
the company is preparing to launch its public autonomous vehicle testing in those cities.
&Manual driving introduces new scenarios that our
system will encounter and allows us to recreate them in a virtual world or on the test track to improve system performance,& Meyhofer wrote
in a blog posted Thursday
&This is an important step to self-driving operations
We will only pursue a return to road for self-driving in these cities in coordination with federal, state, and local authorities.&
The
company has been creeping towards this moment since July, when it started manually driving a small fleet of its modified self-driving Volvo
XC90 vehicles onPittsburgh city streets
That tiptoe back into the program came with a new set of stricter safety standards that included real-time monitoring of its test drivers,
more robust training, and efforts to beef up simulation.
Uber says it has spent months testing its technology on a closed track as well as a
lengthy internal review and subsequent change to its safety driver training practices
The company also hired former National Transportation Safety Board chair Christopher Hart an adviser to assess thecompany overall safety
culture.
New Rules of the Road
Uber ATG said it putting a &small handful& of self-driving vehicles on Pittsburgh public roads and only
during daylight hours on weekdays
The self-driving tests will occur in Pittsburgh Strip District, an area where other companies such as Argo AI and Aurora are developing
autonomous vehicle technology.
Uber will require two trained employees, which they call &mission specialists& to be in the test vehicles
whether they&re being manually driven or in autonomous mode
These employees will be limited to four hours behind the wheel in a workday and must take a break and switch positions every two hours
The remainder of the workday will be spent on other responsibilities outside of the vehicle, an Uber spokesperson said.
Uber says its made
technical changes to its self-driving software to improvedetection and tracking of pedestrians and cyclists, and drive more defensively as
well as the addition of a driver monitoring system, which detects a distracted operator, sounds an audible alert in the cabin, and
immediately sends a notification to a remote monitoring team for review and escalation.
Uber has also said that the automated emergency
braking system that comes standard in the Volvo XC90 will remain active.
