Japan Advances on Self-Driving Road.
Japan will begin testing autonomous taxis—carrying human passengers—on public roads next year, and hopes to show off its technology by the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Robot taxis are poised to become a reality during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics with the government announcing plans for a pilot scheme testing the technology on public roads. Announced Thursday by the Japanese government and Robot Taxi Inc., the trial will initially serve about 50 residents in the Kanagawa prefecture, shuttling them between their home and local grocery stores, according to The Wall Street Journal.
TM 2.02 % on Thursday started selling a safety device that allows a car to communicate with other vehicles or traffic lights, part of an effort to change the perception that Japan trails Silicon Valley in driving technology. The cabs—retrofitted versions of Toyota’s Estima hybrid minivan—will drive about two miles, part of which will be major city roads; two co-pilots will be present during test drives, in case of emergency.
Created in collaboration with ZMP, a robotics start-up based in Tokyo, the self-driving taxis are reportedly retrofitted versions of the Estima hybrid minivan made by Toyota, complete with sensors and image recognition technology. As Silicon Valley competitors such as Google champion self-driving vehicles, many Japanese automotive executives have expressed caution, saying more time is needed to make fully autonomous cars feasible, and consumers might not want them. But if the program is successful, Robot Taxi expects to have a fully commercial service running within five years—just in time to host the Tokyo Summer Olympics. “We can’t stick to the way we do business here in Japan, which is to unite everyone in the industry and work together,” Shinjiro Koizumi, parliamentary vice minister of the cabinet office, said during a Thursday briefing, as reported by Bloomberg. “The government should create a competitive environment and welcome everyone to participate.” A joint venture between mobile Internet company DeNA and vehicle technology developer ZMP, Robot Taxi is billed as “your personal driver.” Based on a translated website, the company plans to offer unmanned rides to folks traveling from overseas, as well as locals in need of transport where buses and trains are unavailable. Toyota’s new device, which costs about $250 and is available only in Japan, allows cars to exchange data with other cars or infrastructure such as traffic lights via radio waves. Robot Taxi uses a combination of radar sensors, millimeter-wave radar, image analysis on stereo vision cameras and GPS to determine the car’s location.
For the moment, the device’s usefulness is limited because it can talk only to other versions of itself, and few traffic lights or cars are equipped. In April, Apple and IBM teamed up with Japan Post Group to deliver iPads with IBM-developed apps and analytics to 5 million customers in Japan by 2020.
It could alert a driver about the location of other vehicles—useful when visibility is poor—or tell how much longer it will be before a red light turns green. IBM and SoftBank, meanwhile, are selling the ¥198,000 ($1,663) Pepper robot, which detects emotions via built-in cameras, touch sensors, an accelerometer, and other digital senses.
The attendees included Shinjiro Koizumi, son of former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and a vice minister in the current government. “There are a lot of people who say it’s impossible,” he said of self-driving cars, “but I think this will happen faster than people expect.” Indeed some have argued (paywall) that when it comes to self-driving cars, Japan has been asleep at the wheel—and risks ceding the market to foreign rivals. It’s depicting the car as a member of the community and something that people trust and rely on, targeting customers who can no longer drive but still want to be active and mobile could be interested in self-driving cabs.
The new system is the next step by allowing cars to get information from each other, rather than relying solely on radar and camera images, said Toyota safety executive Moritaka Yoshida. Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, and Tesla are all developing autonomous driving features, and Google has been testing self-driving cars on US roads this year. Last month, for the first time in Japan, the number of citizens age 100 and up hit over 60,000. (That figure was 153 in 1963.) Right now, a quarter of the entire country is at least 65.
Toyota, for its part, is investing $50 million with Stanford and MIT on autonomous-vehicle research, and yesterday it announced an upcoming safety device designed to send and receive information between vehicles and roadway infrastructure.