Yandex Demos Self-driving Car on Las Vegas Streets at CES 2019

Yandex has demonstrated self-driving car on Las Vegas public streets during CES 2019 event.

Yandex started working on driverless technology since 2017 with their experience in the fields machine learning, navigation, mapping tools, and cloud technologies. As of now, self-driving (driverless) car tests are carried out in all weather conditions across three countries. Yandex is also operating robot-taxi services in two cities in Russia.  With just a safety engineer in the front passenger seat, the robot-taxi services at two Russian cities have delivered over 2000 passenger rides.

The team at Yandex acquired a local car and made all necessary changes in terms of sensors and hardware for self-driving operation. Along with these changes, Yandex's mapping technologies were updated to accommodate a custom HD map of the neighborhood around the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. The Yandex's self-driving software stack then optimized and localized for the Las Vegas driving conditions. The self-driving software stack is proprietary to Yandex. All changes were completed in the matter of one month. According to the announcement, "The route tests the Yandex self-driving car against unprotected left-hand turns, pedestrians, and busy traffic with speeds up to 45 mph."


Head of Yandex Self-Driving,  Dmitry Polishchuk, said, “We are excited to show our self-driving achievements to the CES community here in the US. After first building and testing vehicles in Moscow, the world’s second most congested city, and launching a successful robo-taxi program that is operating throughout the winter in two cities, coming to CES was a great opportunity to test our technology’s scalability and flexibility in a new environment.  Similar to our robo-taxi program, our self-driving car in Las Vegas is operational with just a safety engineer in the front passenger seat, which is an important step in advancing our technology.”

Yandex further said that Las Vegas is the first location where they have tested their self-driving car outside Russia. Yandex also plans to expand its self-driving tests to Israel. Below is the youtube video from Yandex (channel) for their first winter tests.