Mini-Mobility Vehicles

Many of the objects I’ve been talking about weigh only a few pounds and would fit in a small carrier. This carrier fits nicely on something the size of a remote control car – we’ll call it a “Mini-Mobility Vehicle”. You don’t need anything as large as a Personal Mobility Vehicle.

You can buy a remote control car for about $20, just search on Amazon.com to see them. So the Mini-Mobility Vehicles can be really inexpensive.

We’ve talked a lot about food, so let’s use dinner delivery as an example to see how this could work. The food preparation person puts the dinner in a bag, which fits nicely in a holder on top of the waiting Mini-Mobility Vehicle.

The Mini-Mobility Vehicle navigates out of the kitchen, zooms down the halls and gets to your door. Let’s assume you have a sort of “doggie door” that lets the Mini-Mobility Vehicle in. So the Mini-Mobility Vehicle drives right up beside your chair, you pick up the bag and begin enjoying your eagerly awaited dinner. The Mini-Mobility Vehicle then zooms off to where it is needed next. The total time for the Mini-Mobility Vehicle is about 5 minutes, depending on how far it needs to go.

This same approach works for transporting mail, medicines, books, and many of our daily needs.

Of course I glossed over a lot of important details:

• Is it really feasible to have autonomous vehicles driving around? 
• What tells the Mini-Mobility Vehicle how to get to my home?
• Why doesn’t the Mini-Mobility Vehicle run into things along the way?
• Won’t people trip over the Mini-Mobility Vehicle in the halls?
• Will the delivery be slow if the Mini-Mobility Vehicle has to go very far because they don’t go that fast?
• Won’t the batteries run down if the Mini-Mobility Vehicle is used continuously like this?
• How secure is it to have a “doggie door”?
• What will the whole system cost?

These are all great questions, and are exactly what I want to talk about in coming posts.