Latest updates · 21 October 2026
In the full issue →Robotaxis are arriving in Europe: Waymo has started testing in Madrid ahead of paid rides from 2027, and Google is bringing personalised Gemini help to cars with Android Auto and Google built-in.
Research, industry & policy
- Waymo starts robotaxi testing in Madrid, El País · 20 Oct 2026: Driverless cars will start running in Alcobendas, Getafe and Madrid in the coming days, with commercial trips planned from 2027.
- Gemini Personal Intelligence comes to cars, Google · 20 Oct 2026: Google is rolling out hands-free personalised Gemini help on the road for Android Auto and cars with Google built-in.
Journals & preprints
- Think Densely, Act Sparsely: Latent Expert Cognitive Chains for Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving, arXiv 2610.25734 · 19 Oct 2026: Autonomous driving fundamentally demands dense understanding of visual, semantic, and geometric information, yet existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically trained with sparse…
- A Semantic Knowledge Graph Construction Pipeline for Vehicle Intention Prediction in nuScenes, arXiv 2610.26528 · 19 Oct 2026: Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly used in autonomous driving (AD) to make traffic scene entities and relations explicit for prediction and reasoning.
Conferences, workshops & events
- ASAM International Conference 2026, 4–5 Nov 2026 · Munich: Standards for automated driving and simulation.
- ICITE 2026, 6–8 Nov 2026 · Hong Kong: Intelligent transportation engineering conference.
- FAV Summit 2026, 11–13 Nov 2026 · Orlando: Future of autonomous vehicles.
Why it matters
Madrid is a test of whether US-style robotaxi services can adapt to European cities and rules.
