Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:Yandex says it caught an employee selling access to user email accounts for personal gains, and is in process of notifying 4,887 affected mailbox ownersThe Russian company said the employee sold access to 4,887 user email accounts.Russian search engine and email provider Yandex
Inside Yandex self-driving vehicle: Right here’s what it resembles to ride on Moscow’s insane roadways
Yandex, Russia’s Google, is enhancing its self-driving tech for bad weather condition and also human vehicle drivers who bend the policies.
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Composed by Andrada Fiscutean, Factor on June 6, 2018
With severe wintertimes, vehicle drivers that continuously change lanes, traffic and also periodic collisions, the Russian resources of Moscow gives a difficult setup for screening autonomous autos.
” In Moscow, the guys behind you beep the horn also prior to the traffic lights transform green,” says Dmitry Polishchuk, head of Yandex’s driverless automobile task.
Polishchuk is taking me on a ride along Moscow’s hectic streets to show me how much the business’s self-driving innovation has actually evolved in the year and also a fifty percent considering that it was officially revealed.
Since local legislation does not allow unmanned cars on public roadways, one of his colleagues, Alex, is sitting behind the wheel really hoping not to need to touch it. In the previous 24 hr, I’ve seen no less than three car crashes on the city’s crazy roadways.
See: Our autonomous future: Just how driverless cars will be the first robots we learn to trust fund (cover tale PDF).
It’s almost midday, and the streets of Moscow are busy with cars and trucks driving close to each various other, bikes, as well as pedestrians. Yandex’s self-driving technology, mounted in a Toyota Prius nicknamed Teddy, hits the trail heading in the direction of Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Road, where Mikhail Bulgakov composed his unique The Master and also Margarita.
The car is driving at a little over 40km/h, or 25mph. There are 3 parks close by, as well as youngsters with kick scooters are eager to go across the road, regardless of the traffic lights.
On a computer system screen that I’m not enabled to film, Polishchuk reveals me exactly how the self-driving auto regards the atmosphere. It categorizes items such as automobiles, pedestrians or cyclists making use of data from different type of sensing units, camera as well as lidar– an innovation that determines the range to targets utilizing lasers.
Between the lidar measurements, the automobile makes use of odometry, determining just how much the wheels have transformed as well as in which instructions, Polishchuk claims. Yandex overlaps this details on its topographic maps of the city, which have all the lanes and also restrictions such as rate limitations.
” We have something that’s called localization,” he states.
” The leading task: the automobile must know where it is located on the map with centimeter precision, and also it needs to know the instructions [in which it’s heading]”.
After that, it needs to comprehend what’s around, identifying other vehicles, pedestrians, traffic control, roadway marking, and roadway signs, as well as comparing them with the things on the preloaded map.
” Next is prediction: as soon as you know what’s around you, you need to know what occurs next,” Polishchuk claims. The list below stage is intending: the auto determines what to do and carries out the strategy.
” [In web traffic] the hardest thing to understand is purpose, because no one is really complying with the rules, every person is damaging the web traffic policies a bit,” Polishchuk informs me.
In this community of Moscow, one can not drive without getting near to other vehicles. Sometimes, passing automobiles miss us by no more than 15cm or 20cm, 6 to 8 inches.
” The cars and truck is not scared of getting near to various other autos,” the Yandex designer said. When it comes across pedestrians, it’s configured to quit.
Self-driving automobiles: A level-by-level explainer of independent cars (CNET).
When the laser beam of light fails to work, the system uses the International Navigation Satellite System, yet GNSS is not extremely trustworthy in the Russian funding.
” In Moscow, there are specific locations where they spoof the satellite signal. We’re not scared of that, we understand the area,” Polishchuk claims.
He’s particularly happy regarding the map his team created, which can be utilized regardless of changes in the atmosphere: “We had a snow map, when we evaluated [the vehicle] in winter season, and when we drove after the snow thawed, it was still very dependable.”.
Conditions like snow and rainfall are challenging for the lidar since there’s a lot of sound, yet Yandex makes use of algorithms to clean it up. On the race track located on the outskirts of Moscow, the cars and truck reaches up to 70km/h, or 44mph.
A girl simply in front of us begins to cross the street yet quits after taking a step and returns. The cars and truck stops, waiting on her choice. Other drivers in Moscow would have gone directly ahead.
” We can not break the traffic regulations,” Polishchuk says. During one of the tests, frustrated that the auto was following every policy, a person told Polishchuk: “Your automobile drives like my mom.”.
At a junction, chauffeurs have to bargain that goes first. The engineer says it’s a tough situation for an independent auto due to the fact that it involves human interaction: “A human chauffeur waves his hand or trembles his head. You must await someone to let you go.”.
For now, Yandex intends to deal with the regional market, where it believes it can do a better task than worldwide giants such as Waymo. The Russian designers believe they are can produce much better maps and also have a superior understanding of local problems.
