Let’s Rock Your Self-Driving Car, Uber

It’s a breath of fresh air in the making. When Uber – the renowned transportation startup and Volvo agrees to a partnership for a business venture, you know its definitely bound to re-define success.

According to Bloomberg report, Uber and Volvo have signed a $300 million agreement to develop autonomous vehicles which will firstly take off in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania later this month.

An autonomous car is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human input. Autonomous cars can detect surroundings using a variety of techniques such as radar, lidar, GPS, odometry, and computer vision.

With this development, the Swedish-based carmaker owned by China’s Geely and ride-hailing service – Uber have visualize the potentials of developing the autonomous driving with an initial plan of launching the Volvo’s XC90 SUV model to commence the ground-breaking partnership. The investment resources are motivated to be shared equally by both companies involved.

This deal is in a bid for Uber to attract and team up with vehicle manufacturers at Silicon Valley, and largely plan to discard its minicabs drivers.

Meanwhile, the investment is aimed at researching and developing purposes which include, hardware like sensors which aids to detect traffic and obstacles also provides software for self-driving cars.

Both companies have similar goals towards a self-driving car radiating in our world. Uber is buying Volvos with further plans to install its own driverless control system thereby meeting the needs of its ride-hailing service.  More so, Volvo is expected to use the same designed vehicle for its own autonomous driving objectives, possibly controlled by a driver in the car.

The people of Pittsburgh will experience the vehicles this week on trial basis, according to Bloomberg reports. “Uber customers who order a cab may randomly be sent one of the self-driving vehicles, which — at this stage — will have a human in the driver seat supervising.”

The ride-hailing service recently purchased a driverless truck startup named Otto, for $680 million.

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>> Image: [BusinessInsider]