Uber To Deploy 'Thousands' Of Autonomous Taxis, Starting In Texas

• Uber will deploy May Mobility's robotaxi in Arlington, Texas, later this year.
• In the next few years, the partnership will result in "thousands" of robotaxis on U.S. streets.

Uber has partnered with a startup called May Mobility to deploy thousands of self-driving taxis in the United States. That won't happen right away—the first autonomous minivans will make their way Arlington, Texas, by the end of this year. In the coming years, the driverless fleet will expand significantly to other markets.

Before this multi-year partnership between the two entities came together, May Mobility offered rides in its driverless Toyota Sienna people carriers within campuses and planned communities. In Arlington, the startup partnered with the University of Texas to offer on-demand robotaxi rides to popular destinations around town, but focusing on the campus.

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Now, the tie-up enables the startup to reach more customers, while Uber adds yet another robotaxi partner to its roster of autonomous vehicle partnerships including Waymo and Volkswagen, among others.

As with every other vehicle type on Uber, customers in Arlington will have the option to choose a May Mobility vehicle when they book a ride in the smartphone app. The first rides will have human safety operators behind the steering wheel, with the transition to driverless rides happening sometime in the future.

What makes May Mobility’s AV tech stand out from most of the competition is its ability to learn on the fly. Per the startup, its Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) system is a real-time, reinforcement-learning artificial intelligence algorithm that isn’t limited by training data collected ahead of time. Instead, the vehicles, fitted with a myriad of sensors, generate training examples relevant to their current environment and learn while driving. This happens every 200 milliseconds.

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Using this technology, May Mobility claims it can deploy autonomous vehicles at a fraction of the cost and time compared to the competition, all while delivering more reliable and safe driverless transportation.

The robotaxi startup said it completed 100,000 autonomous rides since its Rapid AV pilot program debuted in March 2021.