Honda announced on Thursday that it aims to launch a driverless taxi service in central Tokyo starting from early 2026 by teaming up with General Motors and its autonomous driving unit. Honda, GM and the American automaker's autonomous driving unit Cruise, will establish a joint venture next year to prepare for the robotaxi service that will be using the Cruise Origin vehicle, which has no driver's seat and can accommodate up to six passengers. In Japan, self-driving technology is often seen as an effective solution to maintain transportation services in aging rural areas facing population decline, with transportation service operators struggling to make a profit amid a shortage of drivers.

The age of the driverless taxi has arrived – at least in parts of Phoenix, Arizona. Self-driving car company Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, announced its autonomous vehicles are now available to the general public (or at least paying customers). The service is only available in a limited area for now, both because regulations in Arizona are relatively permissive and because the cars need a detailed three-dimensional map to tell them all about the road environment. Until earlier this year, the self-driving vehicles were under testing and were used in 5-10% of Waymo's rides. The service has been shut because of the pandemic, but is now back and Waymo is aiming to increase availability.

Yi Yake and his boyhood friends grew up in a farming village in central China, swinging sickles to harvest the family wheat crop. Yi got a job marketing computer games. His friend worked in a fireworks store. Today Yi drives a white BMW and, along with two childhood buddies, employs over 200 people in what is quickly becoming a boom industry in China -- artificial intelligence. Their company, located in a city near their parents' village in Henan province, provides an essential early service in the AI process, labeling images and videos to help make computers smarter.

Their company, located in a city near their parents' village in Henan province, provides an essential early service in the AI process, labeling images and videos to help make computers smarter. Before a self-driving car can learn to avoid hitting people or trees, it must learn what people and trees look like -- by digesting thousands of images labeled by thousands of humans. Demand for labeling is exploding in China as large tech companies, banks and others attempt to use AI to improve their products and services. Many of these companies are clustered in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but the lower-tech labeling business is spreading some of the new-tech money out to smaller towns, providing jobs beyond agriculture and manufacturing. The science is mired in controversy in China, where the ruling Communist Party is using AI to help it identify and track people in mass-surveillance programs, most prominently in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang, according to Human Rights Watch.

Kicking off a new year is always a great opportunity to look back at what transpired over the last 12 months. We passed along the top robotics stories and most-funded robotics companies of 2018. Now it is time to look ahead at what to watch in 2019. Stay tuned for trends and startup companies to track, but 2019 is also a pivotal year for major companies working in robotics, too. Below, in alphabetical order, are major companies in the robotics space to watch in 2019.

Last month, Waymo launched its first self-driving taxi service -- Waymo One -- in Phoenix, Arizona, but you would hardly know it by scrolling through your feed. We don't know how many people are using the Google offshoot's self-driving minivans (Waymo won't say), but the ones that are have been surprisingly mute on social media. One exception is Shawn Metz, a 30-year-old HR manager who lives in Chandler, Arizona. Since he was invited to use Waymo One in December, Metz has posted at least a dozen videos on Instagram and YouTube, documenting his experience using Waymo's self-driving minivans. He's become the hero of AV enthusiasts on Reddit for his willingness to answer questions and post unedited videos of his rides.

Alphabet subsidiary Waymo will launch the world's first commercial self-driving taxi service within weeks, according to a report. The Google spin-off aims to begin accepting paying passengers in December, Bloomberg reported, with operations beginning in Phoenix, Arizona. A person familiar with the plans said that the self-driving car service will compete directly with Uber and Lyft, though will not operate under the name Waymo. Supercars that didn't make the showroom Supercars that didn't make the showroom The exact date of launch and the name of the service were not revealed, though it is expected to be a relatively quiet affair with a limited number of passengers. In an emailed statement to the publication, the company said: "Waymo has been working on self-driving technology for nearly a decade, with safety at the core of everything we do."

Uber barreled into autonomous driving out of fear that it could end up as the Myspace or Yahoo of ride-hailing, a company with early gargantuan success that stumbled as times changed. Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has pursued its ambitions more cautiously, accumulating long years of research and testing before pursuing a plan to bring its technology to the public. Now, as Waymo scales up its self-driving taxi service, Uber's fear could be coming to pass. As Uber continues to reel from a fatal self-driving accident in Arizona, Waymo has confidently pushed forward -- landing a deal to build 20,000 self-driving luxury sport utility vehicles with Jaguar Land Rover on top of its plan for thousands of Chrysler hybrid minivans. Within two years, it plans to have thousands of fully autonomous taxis -- with no backup drivers behind the wheel -- on the roads, starting in Phoenix, where it is already giving test rides. The company predicts it will give 1 million robot-taxi rides a day by 2020.

Would you subscribe to a ride-hailing service like Lyft if you could, just as you might sign up for Netflix or Spotify? On Wednesday, Logan Green, the CEO of Lyft, said that was the future for his company. "We are going to move the entire [car] industry from one based on ownership, to one based on subscription," he said. For example, Green added that a subscription to Lyft could cost something along the lines of $200, which gets you 1,000 miles of traveling around. "You rely on the Lyft network for all your transportation needs," he said. It's worth noting that for Lyft, the idea is hypothetical.

Waymo already turned 600 Chrysler Pacifica minivans into self-driving vehicles, but apparently, those aren't enough for the company's upcoming taxi service. FCA US has revealed that it's supplying the former Google self-driving division with thousands of Chrysler Pacific minivans and that delivery will begin in late 2018. Waymo will use the vehicles it's already testing to launch its ride-hailing service in Phoenix this year -- the additional driverless minivans will be deployed to other cities when the service expands its reach. "With the world's first fleet of fully self-driving vehicles on the road, we've moved from research and development, to operations and deployment. The Pacifica Hybrid minivans offer a versatile interior and a comfortable ride experience, and these additional vehicles will help us scale."