One of the countries that is most akin to technological advancement is Japan. And since innovation has been part of the Japanese culture, the latest news on a driverless robotic taxi is quite not so strange among them. Robot Taxi Inc. is currently doing tests on its unmanned service vehicle.

The driverless taxi will be serving the people in Kanagawa, a small prefecture in the southern part of Tokyo. The unmanned public vehicle will serve around 50 residents -- bringing folks from their individual homes to local grocery stores and other places where public transportation seems impossible.

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The service will greatly improve the lives and mobility, especially among the elderly people. The driverless cars will be programmed to drive around three kilometers per ride and will also be directed to move around main roads along with other manned vehicles.

To ensure safety, the team testing the vehicles will be putting a driver on the driver seat just in case something goes out of hand. The drivers will not be doing anything with the robot taxi. They were just there to standby until something goes wrong, Yahoo News reported.

The audacious project was made possible through the collaboration of the three big companies. Tasked with the operational functions of the robot taxi, Robot Taxi Co., Ltd. collaborated the expertise of two other companies that are well-versed with automatic operations technology: DeNA and ZMP.

Since the inception of the internet, DeNA has been a major innovator to a variety of businesses. DeNa was one of the first companies to deliver concentrated effort on the early stages of the mobile technology and mobile gaming. With the vast know-how accumulated on hands-on experience DeNA, through collaboration with other industries, created synergy is geared towards enhanced business value.

ZMP, on the other hand, is consisted of experts in the field of automobile automatic operation technology. These are the very people responsible for the development of the platform for the Robocar® and most sensor systems.

For ZMP, "Robot of Everything and the application of robot technology is everything, safe, fun -- creating a convenient lifestyle".

These three companies will be working hand-in-hand with the aim of promoting ease among transportation businesses through the use of automatic operation technology. The robot taxi trials are set to commence next year.

Robot Taxi is currently on its testing stage and hopes to be in service trials in March 2016. The company is further hopeful that production of such incredible machine will be maximized and be fully commercialized before 2020, as Tokyo will be hosting the Olympics by that time.

 

TagsRobotics, Robotic Taxi, Robot Taxi, Driverless Robotic Taxi, robot technology