An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber is putting its autonomous vehicles back on Pittsburgh’s city streets, four months after a fatal accident involving one of its self-driving cars prompted the ride-hailing company to halt testing on public roads. But for now, Uber’s modified self-driving Volvo XC90 vehicles will only be driven manually by humans and under a new set of safety standards that includes real-time monitoring of its test drivers and efforts to beef up simulation. The sensors, including light detection and ranging radar known as LiDAR, will be operational on these self-driving vehicles. They won’t be operated in autonomous mode, however. Uber will use these manually operated self-driving vehicles to update its HD maps of Pittsburgh. This manual-first rollout is a step toward Uber’s ultimate goal to relaunch its autonomous vehicle testing program in Pittsburgh, according to Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, who published a post Tuesday on Medium. Uber said that all its self-driving vehicles, whether they’re driven manually or eventually in autonomous mode, will have two Uber employees inside. “These ‘mission specialists’ — a new name Uber has given to its test drivers — will have specific jobs,” reports TechCrunch. “The person behind the wheel will be responsible for maintaining the vehicle safety, while the second ‘mission specialist’ will ride shotgun and document events.” Every vehicle will also have a driver monitoring system that will track driver behavior in real time.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot