Japan to begin trials of a robot taxi service this year

Japan is already home to the world’s monster robots — robots the size of the ones you see in the transformer movie.It has one of the fastest trains in the world.It also has the world’s first hotel where robots perform room service and serve meals;replacing 90 percent human labour.

One of its telecom operators Softbank has an emotional robot called pepper that sells coffee machines all over the country for Nestle and officiated a wedding between two robots.What else is missing in the Asian country Japan? Well Self-driving cars.Or fleets of self-driving taxis.

One of Google’s yet official plans for its self-driving car project is to run a company where its fleets of autonomous vehicles would take Californians from point A to B safely at the touch of a button by 2020.However, Japan’s Robot Taxi Inc, also wants to have fleets of autonomous vehicles in the country as soon as possible.

It revealed on Thursday that it would carry out trials of a robotic taxi service with 50 people next year.The Japan robot taxi service will involved the use of driverless vehicles that will ferry the aged around Kanagawa prefecture, south of Tokyo.

As with all testing of self-driving cars, a human driver will always sit at driver’s seat at all times to take control of the self-driven vehicle just in case the software or technology fails. The autonomous vehicles will drive three kilometres per journey and most of the journeys would also be on public roads; not just in streets.

They also intend to offer self-driving cabs to foreigners and locals in places where buses and trains are not available by 2020, if these trials go well as planned.