Lyft Inc. today announced plans to make autonomous taxis available to users of its ride-hailing app in Atlanta.
According to NBC News, the vehicles will start taking passengers in the summer. Lyft plans to follow up the launch by extending its autonomous ride-hailing service to Dallas next year. In the longer term, the company will bring autonomous taxis to several additional markets.
In Atlanta, Lyft plans to partner with a startup called May Mobility Inc. on the rollout. The latter company is backed by about $300 million in funding from BMW i Ventures, Toyota Ventures and other institutional backers. It operates a shuttle service powered by autonomous Toyota Sienna minivans that follow fixed routes.
May Mobility’s vehicles use an internally developed autonomous driving system called MPDM. According to the company, the software makes driving decisions by estimating what nearby drivers and pedestrians will do next. It then simulates multiple ways of responding to those projected movements and picks the course of action deemed to be the safest.
MPDM uses several different sensors to collect data about the road ahead. If one of them malfunctions, the platform can use the remaining sensors to continue driving. There are also several other safety features, including a tool that allows May Mobility staffers to log into a vehicle during challenging driving situations.
Lyft’s autonomous taxi service in Atlanta will use Toyota Sienna minivans powered by MPDM. In Dallas, the next location where the service is set to launch, the company will take a different approach. It plans to partner with Marubeni Corp., a Japanese conglomerate that operates car dealerships, as well as Intel Corp.’s Mobileye unit.
Mobileye provides an autonomous driving system called Driver that competes with May Mobility’s software. The system is based on the Intel unit’s EyeQ 6 chip, which features an eight-core central processing unit and artificial intelligence accelerators. Drive combines four of the chips with cameras, lidar sensors and radar units.
According to The Verge, Lyft’s long-term goal is to create an autonomous fleet with “thousands of vehicles” that will be available in multiple cities. The company will use May Mobility’s MPDM software in several of those cities.
Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft’s top competitor, has launched an autonomous taxi service of its own in partnership with Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo unit. The vehicles are currently available in Austin and Atlanta. Earlier this year, the companies announced plans to make the service available in Dallas.
Image: Lyft
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