According to the operator, 5 buses run on a route of 22.5 km. (representative)
Queensferry, United Kingdom:
The UK will roll out its first self-driving bus network in Scotland next week with drivers on standby behind the wheel, ready to take control should an emergency arise.
The service, which aims to carry 10,000 passengers a week over a 14-mile route using five single-decker buses, will be the world’s first automated local bus service, the operator said.
“The autonomous technology on this bus has been tested before, but this is the first time it has been put on a bus that is now a registered local bus service,” Stagecoach bus service policy director Peter Stevens told AFP after a demonstration. near Edinburgh.
From Monday, the buses, which run at up to 50 miles per hour, will have a safety driver to monitor the technology, as required by UK law, which does not yet allow fully autonomous vehicles.
Drivers don’t touch the controls while the vehicle is in autonomous mode, and an onboard conductor handles ticket sales and passenger inquiries.
The on-board system detects other road users to avoid collisions, while optical cameras and radar scan the road to check for pedestrians.
The operating system contains an artificial intelligence engine that receives information from the entire bus to determine its exact location and calculate the safest route to the destination.
Stevens said the service would be safer, more economical and provide a better experience for customers.
‘Technological Revolution’
“The system is designed to increase security,” he said.
“The driver now has a 360-degree view and the system can react faster than a human in terms of reaction time.
“There will always be a safety driver in the seat, even if the bus itself is driving. So that if they need to take control, they can take control.”
Stevens said the buses would continually learn the route and collect thousands of hours of data per month.
“As the service starts, we will collect more data and then we will increase the amount of autonomous travel,” he said.
Bus driver Callum Jones said the service was “something new, exciting to see, part of our technology revolution”.
“It’s okay,” he said.
Last year, a self-driving bus was tested in Seoul, South Korea’s capital, as part of an experiment engineers said aimed at making people more comfortable with self-driving vehicles on the road.
In 2021, a self-driving electric bus began running in Malaga, Spain, in a project presented as the first in Europe, with Singapore launching a self-driving bus trial earlier this year.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)