The autonomous
golf carts (shown here) deployed in the Singapore
public gardens
relied on just a few unobtrusive sensors.
Screenshot from
video provided by SMART
Autonomous vehicles share sidewalk space with pedestrians in
six-day trial in Singaporean public garden.
(September 2, 2015) At
the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in September,
members of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) and
their colleagues will describe an experiment conducted over six days at a large
public garden in Singapore, in which self-driving golf carts ferried 500
tourists around winding paths trafficked by pedestrians, bicyclists, and the
occasional monitor lizard.
The experiments also tested an online booking system that
enabled visitors to schedule pickups and drop-offs at any of 10 distinct
stations scattered around the garden, automatically routing and redeploying the
vehicles to accommodate all the requests.
“We would like to use robot cars to make transportation
available to everyone,” says Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor
in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a senior
author on the conference paper. “The idea is, if you need a ride, you make a
booking, maybe using your smartphone or maybe on the Internet, and the car just
comes.”
The researchers asked participants in the experiment to fill
out a brief questionnaire after their rides. Some 98 percent said that they
would use the autonomous golf carts again, and 95 percent said that they would
be more likely to visit the gardens if the golf carts were a permanent fixture.
SMART is a collaboration between MIT and the National
Research Foundation of Singapore. With lead researchers drawn from both MIT and
several Singaporean universities — chiefly the National University of Singapore
and the Singapore University of Technology and Design — the program offers
four-year graduate fellowships that cover tuition for students at the
affiliated schools, as well as undergraduate and postdoctoral research
fellowships.