Ride-hailing app Uber has tapped Israeli autonomous driving startup Autobrains and US chipmaker giant Nvidia for a pilot program set to bring driverless robotaxis to the streets of the German city of Munich.

The project marks the first major testing ground for Autobrains, which develops self-learning artificial intelligence tech for assisted and autonomous driving, as Uber looks to enter a rapidly expanding competition for scaling up self-driving operations.

For at least a decade, tech titans, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, have made grand promises to make self-driving, autonomous cars a reality for the public.

While self-driving cars are not yet being offered to consumers, robotaxis have been rolled out in several US cities, led by Google’s sister Waymo, with a fleet of 3,000 self-driving vehicles giving some 500,000 rides a week. Its main rival, Tesla, currently only available in a few Texas cities, has plans to expand to several more metro areas around the country.

Europe, in contrast, has lagged far behind, due to tight safety rules and regulatory bottlenecks, alongside a culture that relies on public transport. But as the Continent pushes toward allowing AI-powered cabs to roam its streets, ride-sharing app Uber is positioning itself as among the first in line to tap into the market.

In early June, after several years of delays, Germany, Italy, France and 15 other European Union countries signed a joint declaration to coordinate autonomous vehicle testing across borders, intended to facilitate the regulatory path and adoption of the technology across Europe.

Uber has placed bets on a few AI autonomous technology companies that could compete with the likes of Waymo and jump-start a larger-scale commercial rollout of autonomous vehicles, which has been harder than anticipated due to high costs, safety issues, and tight regulations. Among other ventures, it has introduced robotaxis with Chinese AI firms WeRide in Spain and Pony.Ai in Croatia, as well as other pilots in the Gulf.

Earlier this month, the San Francisco-based company teamed up with Autobrains, the developer of a self-learning artificial intelligence technology for assisted and autonomous driving, for its latest venture, this time in Germany.

Autobrain’s autonomous driving software system takes a different path than other self-driving technologies, relying on several specialized AI agents for the various processes involved in driving, which is meant to create a system that’s both safer and more cost-effective.

“For automakers and autonomy developers, the challenge is not just building autonomous vehicles — it’s bringing them into a commercial network where they can reliably serve riders at scale,” said Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility and delivery. “This program creates a new path to do that by combining vehicle-agnostic autonomy, leading AI compute,........

© The Times of Israel