Hsinchu City is planning to launch Taiwan’s first test program for driverless logistics vehicles, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday at an event to announce a collaboration among the ministry, the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) and HCT Logistics Co (新竹物流).
The test program is to use 5-tonne trucks and travel 1.9km in some of the busiest traffic in Hsinchu City, the ministry said.
Driverless vehicle technology developed in other countries is not suitable for the circumstances and lane divisions found on local roads, such as the numbers of scooters and their allocations at stop lights, ITRI president Edwin Liu (劉文雄) said, adding that ITRI is filling the need for local development of the technology.
Photo: Hung Mei-hsiu, Taipei Times
“ITRI’s self-driving technology is specially designed for the traffic conditions of Taiwan and Asia. We have already overcome the challenges of mixed car and scooter traffic and the long rainy season,” Liu said.
This particular project is the first driverless pilot program to utilize vehicles for warehouse logistics, and the first to explore the burgeoning logistics market.
“HCT moves more than 450,000 parcels in the Greater Hsinchu area every month,” company president Pablo Lee (李正義) said yesterday. “After we successfully introduce self-driving technology, our first goal is to reduce traffic at our logistic center by 20 percent.”
The company also expects that the development of the program would help solve driver shortage problems and reduce driver workload, Lee said.
The ministry said that all self-driving vehicles are still in the testing phase, with full commercialization “still in the future.”
The testing of self-driving vehicles on public roads among regular traffic was made possible when the Unmanned Vehicles Technologies Innovative Experimentation Act (無人載具科技創新實驗條例) was passed in 2018. Before that, there was no legal framework to test driverless vehicles in open traffic.
Although there are vehicles in Taiwan with some degree of self-driving capability, drivers are only allowed to deploy the technology for assistance.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained