AutoX Puts rolls out fully driverless RoboTaxis on China roads

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In a big step towards an autonomous driving future, Alibaba-backed AutoX has rolled out fully driverless RoboTaxis on the roads of Shenzhen, China’s densest city.

This is the first time a completely autonomous fleet without accompanying safety/backup drivers or remote operators has been deployed in China.

For the past six months, the leading autonomous driving technology company has been conducting driverless stress tests in the Tier 1 city.

A video has also been released to share how the vehicles navigate around downtown Shenzhen. The video shows the fully driverless AutoX RoboTaxi deftly that maneuvers around illegally parked vehicles and loading trucks on the road, yields to pedestrians and scooters, handles construction sites, and makes an unprotected U-turn – all fully executed by the company’s full-stack AutoX Driver platform without any remote operation or human assistance.

The company has been testing 25 driverless RoboTaxis in Shenzhen this year, with five more vehicles testing in other cities around the world.

The driverless RoboTaxis are loaded with the company’s newly released fifth generation system to support autonomous vehicle deployment in urban settings. This new generation is upgraded with more powerful sensing technology to handle the densest and most complex traffic scenarios such as when pedestrians, fast cyclists, and small pets interact at close range to the vehicle simultaneously.

5G sensing system

The fifth generation sensing system fuses an array of ultra high-resolution cameras – designed in-house by AutoX – with two LiDAR sensors placed on both sides of the vehicles as well as advanced 4D RADAR sensors. It also has multiple blind spot sensing suites on all sides of the vehicle, in order to create multi-sensor fusion surround vision that can detect even small objects in blind spots.

AutoX is a leading tech company that develops AI drivers for autonomous driving vehicles, with the mission of ‘Democratizing Autonomy’ to provide universal access to transportation of people and goods.

It was founded in 2016 by Dr. Jianxiong Xiao (a.k.a. Professor X), a self-driving technologist from MIT and Princeton University. The company’s AutoX Driver platform is capable of handling the densest and most dynamic traffic conditions in urban cities around the world.

(With inputs from Automotive Lead Research Team)

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