More than 10,000 autonomous taxis and delivery vans are expected to operate across the UAE next year, with orders already placed for the vehicles as the country prepares to sharply scale up driverless transport, a senior UAE official said on Tuesday.
Faisal Al Bannai, adviser to the UAE President and secretary general of the Advanced Technology Research Council, said the expansion would move autonomous mobility from hundreds of vehicles into the thousands.
“Next year, you will have not tens, not hundreds, thousands of taxis and delivery vans operating in the UAE,” he said at AI Everything Abu Dhabi.
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“Not 1,000, not 5,000, 10,000-plus.”
Al Bannai said the UAE would become the largest deployer of autonomous taxis and vans outside China if the planned scale is reached.
“This is not maybe the roadmap. We’ve already placed the orders for these platforms,” he said.
The vehicles are already operating at a smaller scale in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, he added, with the technology having moved through testing and validation before the planned expansion.
Both emirates have already begun commercial autonomous taxi operations. Abu Dhabi expanded Level 4 autonomous taxi services on Yas Island earlier this year, while Dubai launched commercial autonomous taxi services in areas including Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah.
Abu Dhabi had previously become the first city in the Middle East and North Africa to begin commercial operations of fully driverless Level 4 vehicles, according to Abu Dhabi Mobility.
Al Bannai said the expansion forms part of a wider push into what he described as “physical AI”, where intelligent systems move beyond software and begin operating vehicles, robots and other equipment in the physical world.
Robotics will expand alongside autonomous transport, he said, with thousands of robots expected to be operating across the UAE next year in areas including inspection, monitoring and hospitality. Additionally he stated that companies offering frontier physical intelligence will be announced.
“Next year, UAE and Abu Dhabi especially, the level of robots you will see in the street, the level of vans, robots in the mall, in your compound, in other areas, you will not be able to miss them,” he said.
“They will not be in hundreds, they will be in thousands.”
The remarks came at AI Everything Abu Dhabi, a two-day AI summit and exhibition taking place at Adnec Centre on October 6 and 7.
Source: Khaleej Times