U.S. ride-hailing company Uber Thursday announced resumption of the road testing of its self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State, nine months after a Uber car struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona State.

Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, said in a blog post that the company's self-driving operations were resumed upon the approval of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and following "months of vehicle testing on our track and manual driving on Pittsburgh streets."

"Over the past nine months, we've made safety core to everything we do," Eric said.

He noted that Uber has implemented recommendations from its review processes, spanning technical, operational and organizational improvements, which "required a lot of introspection and took some time."

He also said that Uber has relaunched manual driving tests in San Francisco and Toronto, Canada.

"Manual driving introduces new scenarios that our system will encounter and allows us to recreate them in a virtual world or on the test track to improve system performance," said Eric.

He noted that manual testing is "an important step towards self-driving" before Uber pursues a return to road for self-driving in those cities.

The autonomous driving tests of San Francisco-based Uber have been halted for most of 2018 after one of its prototypical Volvo SUVs struck and killed 49-year-old woman Elaine Herzberg who was walking outside of the crosswalk in March in Tempe, Arizona.

Uber later announced lengthy reviews of its entire autonomous driving test programs following the deadly crash. 

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