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 on-demand taxi service debut


Yandex's on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

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Russia search and internet technology giant Yandex is showing off the self-driving vehicle prototype developed by its Yandex.Taxi on-demand ride service for the first time, and the video above is the first footage of the car in action. The prototype is meant to help Yandex test its software, which the company thinks it's uniquely well-positioned to develop for this emerging space. Yandex notes that it has navigation, geolocation, computer vision, and machine learning expertise from other ongoing products and services, including Yandex.Navigator and Yandex.Maps. "We use anonymised data that we receive from Yandex.Navigator users, which allows us to understand how to drive in a city with its traffic congestion, accidents, speed limits, road closures and other traffic events," Yandex.Taxi Head of PR Vladimir Isaev explained via email. "We have been using computer vision technologies in a number of our services for quite a while. We use them to find vacant parking spaces or read road signs, for instance, in our geolocation services."