Overhead roads for Self-Driving Scooters

This week I attended the first European and the biggest micro-mobility conference. I am actually quite foreign to the field, but I saw people in my twitterverse writing about it, so I got curious and decided to check it out. And I am glad that I did.

As complete n00b, I was blown away by the first keynote held by Horace Dediu. Specially with the facts that micro-mobility is all about cities. The micro-mobility vehicles and the city form a symbiosis and affect each other.

Second highlight of the day (at least for me), was the keynote “The Future of Self-Driving Scooters”, where the presenter could remote control a Scooter in China. The topic of Self-Driving Scooters and remote control was further discussed on the “Robotics for Micromobility” panel.

The main benefits of a self-driving (or remotely controlled) scooter, is that they can redistribute themselves based on demand. There was also a case of company called Refraction, which develops a small vehicles for food delivery. A small delivery drone on wheels if you will.

The main problem with self-driving (or remotely controlled) scooter is that they will be moving around in already crowded and sparse spaces:

• bike lanes
• side walks

This put a very high strain on the pedestrians, bicyclist and also on the technological solutions.

But given the idea of symbiosis of city and micro-mobility, wouldn’t it make sense to provide an additional infrastructure to self-driving robots? An overhead road, which does not stand in the way.

Additional infrastructure is expensive, however given the requirements it could be a low hanging fruit. A scooter, or even a delivery robot, does not occupy much space and is not very heavy. So the road can be very narrow and need a low load capacity. The vehicles can drive in a very tight formation, and the movement on the overhead road can be completely automated, given the lower complexity of the problem. It is also imaginable to adopt some of the given infrastructure. Like for example street lamps could be considered as supporting pillar of the overhead roads.

All in all, it is a very raw idea and probably has many flaws. But I still want to share it with the world and am curious to hear what you think.