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Uber-Branded Car Seen In San Francisco With Cameras On Top Is Not Autonomous

Uber’s plan to test self-driving cars on public roads has not commenced as fast as some believed.
Volvo XC90 modified for autonomous driving capabilities 1 photo
Photo: Uber
This weekend, news site SFist.com published an Instragram video of a Ford Fusion that was branded with the Uber logo and was roaming the streets of San Francisco with a set of cameras on top.

At the time of publication, the person that took the photo and the editors of that website believed the vehicle to be one of the company’s self-driving cars.

Upon inquiry with the American ride-sharing giant, SF Gate reports that Uber was not testing a driverless car in San Francisco. Instead, the vehicle that had Uber’s logo on its body and a set of cameras on top were used for collecting data. The photos taken by its cameras will be employed in Uber’s mapping program.

It is worth noting that the cameras seen on the Ford Fusion that was spotted driving in San Francisco did not resemble those used by Google on its Street View cars.

Instead, the cluster of cameras and various sensors was mounted lower than usually seen on Google’s famous vehicles. The different mounting position led the editors of SFist, along with the photographer, Chris Clausen, to believe otherwise.

The vehicle in question was modified by Otto, a company that develops retrofit technology for vehicles. Uber bought Otto last month, according to SF Gate, and will use its experience for its future autonomous vehicles.

However, the mapping project is a separate part of Uber’s plans, as the ride-sharing giant plans to steer away from Google, its current map supplier.

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, Uber is working on driver-less car technology. The first prototypes will roll out soon, but they will still have humans behind the wheel. The drivers will be engineers, and their role will be to take action in case the system cannot handle the self-driving task at a given moment.

If all goes well, the engineer just takes note and observes the operation of the setup. Pittsburgh was chosen because Uber opened an office there after recruiting staff from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Research Team.

 

A video posted by Eve Batey (@evelb) on Sep 3, 2016 at 10:17am PDT

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About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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