Autonomous vehicle technology now encompasses scooters, potentially affording the elderly and disabled a greater measure of independence.

The autonomous mobility scooter was recently demonstrated in a trial of software 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).

Courtesy of the Autonomous Vehicle Team of the SMART Future of Urban Mobility ProjectThe same sensor and software systems had previously been tested in autonomous cars and golf carts. The scooter tests confirmed the control algorithms work indoors as well as out.

“We were testing them in tighter spaces,” says Scott Pendleton, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at NUS and a research fellow at SMART. “One of the spaces that we tested in was the Infinite Corridor of MIT, which is a very difficult localization problem, being a long corridor without very many distinctive features. You can lose your place along the corridor. But our algorithms proved to work very well in this new environment.”

The software includes low-level control algorithms that enable a vehicle to respond immediately to changes in its environment, such as a pedestrian darting across its path; route-planning algorithms; localization algorithms that the vehicle uses to determine its location on a map; map-building algorithms that it uses to construct the map in the first place; a scheduling algorithm that allocates fleet resources; and an online booking system that allows users to schedule rides (see video).