After Autonomous Cars Come Scooter

Scientists have developed a self-driving scooter using the same technology that powers autonomous cars. The innovation could help mobility impaired people move around even in indoor spaces. A mobility impaired user could use the scooter, which employs a system designed by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), to get down the hall and through the lobby of an apartment building, and take a golf cart across the building’s parking lot. Researchers were testing them in tighter spaces. Low level control algorithms of the system enable a vehicle to respond immediately to changes in its environment, such as a pedestrian darting across its path. Localization algorithms can be used to determine the vehicle’s location on a map. Map-building algorithms are used to construct the map, a scheduling algorithm allocated fleet resources, and an online booking system allows users to schedule rides. Using the same control algorithms for all types of vehicles – scooters, golf carts, and city cars – has several advantages. One is that it becomes much more practical to perform reliable analyses of the system’s overall performance. If you have a uniform system where all the algorithms are the same, the complexity is much lower than if you have a heterogeneous system where each vehicle does something different. With software uniformity, information that one vehicle acquires can easily be transferred to another. For instance, the scooter was tested in Singapore, where it used maps created by an autonomous golf cart. Also, if an autonomous golf cart is not available to take a user across a public park, a scooter could fill in; if a city car is not available for a short trip on back roads, a golf cart might be. the new scooter made its public debut in April of this year when over 100 people were invited to take if for a spin as part of a test of the software.