The company Yandex has announced the launch of the unmanned taxi in Kazan. Test area running in Innopolis. It runs two drone-based Toyota Prius with the test engineer in the cabin, just in case.
According to Yandex, Innopolis is the first city in Europe where you can use the drone for everyday travel.
This is a free service for all adult residents of the city who have agreed to participate in testing. There are five points of embarkation and disembarkation of passengers. They are located near key urban sites: a University, a stadium, a medical centre, residential area “Zion” and the administrative and business centre of a name of Popova.
The car can be called via Telegram bot. The waiting time of the car depends on demand. To speed up the process, developers are advised to join together with neighbors and arrange carpools. In the cabin can accommodate up to three passengers.
The project was launched after the agreement with the government of Tatarstan on development of unmanned vehicles.
We will remind, in the spring of 2017 Yandex for the first time showed its own self-driving taxi and told the details about the project. The first tests were conducted in a closed area of Moscow, near the main office of Yandex. They showed that the prototypes successfully cope with the task. These prototypes are created on the basis of the Toyota Prius in collaboration with the Institute US. In February 2018 were shown a prototype of an unmanned vehicle, which travelled to Moscow in winter conditions. In June a drone Yandex.Taxi independently drove from Moscow to Kazan.