First Self-Driving Cars In New York Launch At Brooklyn Navy Yard

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — New Yorkers may be more than a decade away from hailing a self-driving cab on the city's streets, but if autonomous vehicle technology is going to get to that point at all, a Brooklyn Navy Yard test run is the way to do it, founders of Optimus Ride said Tuesday.

The Boston-based technology company will release a fleet of their self-driving cars, the first of its kind in New York state, at the Navy Yard's 300-acre complex on Wednesday.

The six autonomous vehicles, accompanied by two Optimus Ride staff each, will give the Yard's employees and the general public free rides from Flushing Avenue's Cumberland Gate to the new NYC Ferry stop inside.

Optimus Ride Co-Founder Ryan Chin said the controlled, low-speed campus will only let the company perfect its technology to transition to a fully autonomous car down the line, but will also let New Yorkers get comfortable with that idea for when it comes.

"If you were presented the option of getting into a high-speed autonomous vehicle going 50 mph or one that's going 5 mph, which one would you pick?" he said. "Then you get into the 6 mph vehicle, then next week we'll go 7 mph, then 8 mph — and eventually get to a point where we feel very comfortable with that.

"This is actually the way to accelerate (putting self-driving cars on public roads) because if you have these available, people can try them out and formulate their own opinion about autonomous vehicle technology."

The Navy Yard, where Optimus Ride has offices with New Lab, also offers an important distinction from other New York streets, Chin said, in that its roads are private, and therefore not subject to the regulatory obstacles of bringing autonomous cars onto public roads.

Optimus Ride has already started the transition to public roads with a test site in Boston, but Chin said it will likely be a while before they make the move to public streets here in New York City.

New York's legislature passed a bill two years ago that allows for autonomous vehicle testing on its public roads, but so far companies haven't taken advantage of the law.

But Chin contends that the smaller, private roads like those at the Navy Yard are in many ways a better testing site, anyway. In addition to the laser scanners, cameras and sensors that allow the car to react to cars, people or other moving things, each vehicle is equipped with a huge amount of data about the permanent parts of the Navy Yard's campus.

"The reason we think the Navy Yard is the right place is because it is a generally structured environment," Chin explained. "We basically drove around the entire Navy Yard and we map everything — we map the stop signs, we map the garbage cans, we map all the trees, all the roads, curbs, buildings — everything."

(Anna Quinn/Patch).

The cars use that mapping data to figure out where they are on the streets and then take the data brought in from the sensors to react to moving objects, Chin said.

For now, they will only run the five-minute ride from the Cumberland Gate to the ferry stop and back from 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. each day. But, down the line, Chin said the self-driving cars could expand within the campus to connect people to other transit lines, bring visitors to Navy Yard eating areas or provide "nighttime safe rides" after shuttles stop running.

Each Optimus Ride car in the Yard has a safety driver that can step in if the car doesn't react the right way and a software operator that has a laptop in the front seat to monitor what the car is taking in.

(Anna Quinn/Patch)

Chin said that eventually, though, the cars will be able to run without these people inside. The company hopes to start testing "remote monitoring," where somebody not inside the car can track how it is operating on the streets in the next year or so, likely at its Boston site first.

The company rolled out the fleet on Boston's Seaport about two years ago, another private-road test site at a Boston Development in 2018 and plans to launch two more, at a California retirement community and a private Virginia development, later this year.

The Navy Yard, where Chin said there will be about 20,000 rides each month, will give the company the most data and feedback it has had at any of those other sites.

"That data is tremendously important for improving the systems to the point where we can safely remove the operator," he said. "Eventually you can get to higher speed and more complexity but this is a safer introduction."