Another autonomous car start starts small, and it's a good thing

Optimus Ride, a new Boston-based company, announced Thursday that it would offer renters its $ 1.4 billion mixed-use development project in Reston, Va. Make trips the size of a golf cart, starting at the end of the year. The deployment of the technology will be very modest – three fixed-loop vehicles to the car park – but it highlights the need for autonomous car drivers to master their ambitions before becoming public.

Optimus Ride, a fallout from MIT, said its vehicles would be confined to the Halley Rise private development site and that they would be geoformed, which means they could not operate outside of a specific geographic area. The drivers of human security will be in each vehicle in case something goes wrong, although the company claims that its technology is capable of level 4, or able to handle all the driving tasks in the geological barrier and under conditions specific. Vehicles will not exceed 30 mph.

Optimus Ride's robotic taxi service is the result of an agreement with real estate giant Brookfield Properties, which has numerous commercial and residential sites around the world. If all goes well, Optimus Ride will deploy autonomous vehicles in other properties owned by Brookfield in the future. Halley Rise, a new $ 1.4-billion mixed-use district, will transform a 36-acre office park in Reston into 3.5 million square feet (3.5 million square feet) of housing, retail space retail, office, public green spaces and cultural activities all year round. It is also the future home of a Wegmans food market in Fairfax County.

This deployment evokes similar services, offered by the start-up Travel in California and Florida retiree communities or by Drive.ai in Frisco, Texas: these are low-speed autonomous vehicles located in tightly controlled and equipped areas. an operational team that constantly monitors them.

While billion-dollar companies, such as Waymo, Uber, Ford and GM Cruise, Alphabet, are striving to perfect their robot taxi projects before their launch, more startups small and more agile progresses in the less ambitious pilot projects that operate before our eyes. In addition to Travel and Drive.ai, companies such as May Mobility, Udelv and Nuro are currently driving their strange and slow autonomous vehicles on public roads.

Taxicab taxi services in dense urban environments are extremely complicated and even the most advanced technology companies, such as Waymo and GM, have struggled to develop autonomous vehicles capable of handling difficult traffic scenarios safely and without danger or boredom pedestrians and other drivers on the road.

Optimus Ride, however, will not be the first company to offer stand-alone cars in the Washington, DC area: Ford-backed Argo.ai Group plans to begin testing its autonomous vehicles in the nation's capital this year.