Alphabet's Waymo plans to launch a fully autonomous robotaxi service in Tokyo in 2027, partnering with Japanese taxi firms Go and Nihon Kotsu. The service will start with a small fleet and expand to 100 vehicles, marking the first autonomous service on Japanese public roads and part of Waymo's global expansion that also includes London.
A developer demonstrated that Astra can serve as a high-level planner for autonomous driving in the CARLA simulator, generating waypoints and target speeds from camera images while a local controller handles steering and braking. The system successfully navigated various obstacles by replanning every 0.05 seconds, though performance varied with scenario difficulty and computational cost.