E-scooters may soon zip across cities without a rider, removing the need for workers to collect them and redistribute them, charge their batteries or ensure they are neatly parked.
Rental e-scooters have become a common sight in cities around the world with users able to hire them via a smartphone app and leave them wherever their journey ends. But this tends to mean the hire companies have to go to great efforts to round them up to recharge and redistribute them to places where people usually want to start a ride.
and at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and their colleagues are working on an autonomous scooter that could remove the need for this. They have already demonstrated a self-balancing version that can be operated remotely, and have now shown that adding ultrasonic sensors allows it to automatically stop when faced with an obstacle.
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Their scooters are fitted with a metal disc called a reaction wheel that can rotate in either direction to create torque to keep the scooter upright, guided by tilt sensors and an onboard computer. For the latest advance, the researchers added three low-cost ultrasonic sensors 鈥� one pointing forward and one each to the left and right 鈥� that can detect objects up to 4 metres away. Tests showed that models equipped with these can stop within this distance even while mid-turn.
The team is working on software to allow the scooters to relocate themselves with the help of satnav to specific spots on the University of Stuttgart campus, which Str盲sser says is a contained and less complex environment than a busy city centre.
Meister says the problems faced are similar to those that driverless cars must resolve. 鈥淭he technical tasks that we need to fulfil are the same, but the hope is this can be done with cheap hardware, basically because it鈥檚 at low speeds and there are not so many other participants who are moving at high speeds which we need to observe,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he advantage we have is that we are operating at low speeds, so we will probably not kill anybody.鈥�
The researchers plan to add cameras and upgrade control software to give the vehicles a better understanding of the landscape so they can plan a new route around any obstacles. Str盲sser believes that the technical hurdles should be overcome within a few years, but that there will be legislative and regulatory ones to surmount before scooters are allowed to drive autonomously around cities.
arXiv
