Singapore's first self-driving taxi moves to CBD testing 
Self-driving taxi start-up, NuTonomy, reportedly passed its first driving test in Singapore last week, as it moves closer to achieving its aim of allowing users to hail driverless cars by phone. The company was tasked with sending one of its taxi’s through an obstacle course; it reportedly passed with flying colours, and will now move on to testing cars in Singapore’s central business district. NuTonomy hopes to launch thousands of driverless cars on Singaporean streets over the next few years, and in the process, reduce the number of cars on the roads by 60%.

Image: nuTonomy

Startup NuTonomy wants to make it possible for users to hail driverless cars by phone, and it's starting in Singapore.

The MIT startup's driverless taxi passed its first driving test in Singapore last week, which consisted of navigating the vehicle autonomously through an obstacle course. The company will now continue testing cars in a business district of Singapore and plans to debut thousands of driverless taxis in the city over the next few years.

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The successful testing last week comes after the company raised $3.6 million in seed funding earlier this year. Emilio Frazzoli, nuTonomy co-founder and chief technology officer and MIT professor, said Singapore is particularly good city to test the technology due to its traffic congestion and investment in self driving cars.

NuTonomy implements fleet management technology based on algorithms the US military uses for drone coordination, which the company said would help to reduce traffic and carbon emissions by making cars more efficient. Fazzoli and his colleagues published a study in Road Vehicle Automation in 2014 estimating 300,000 driverless taxis could replace the current number of taxis 780,000 while keeping wait time under 15 minutes.

"That's a 60 percent reduction in the number of vehicles operating in Singapore," Frazzoli told MIT News's Robohub. "This was a big sign of impact for [the Singaporean] government. At first we were asking them to let us test cars there—then they were asking us to come test."

The NuTonomy algorithms include a "formal logic" function that gives cars flexibility when driving to break relatively unimportant "rules of the road." This lets cars use complex judgement to, say, pass obstructions in the street like double-parked cars without running into oncoming traffic.