Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicles

Story: My father’s experiences with mobility got me started thinking about the transportation needs of seniors. My father loved to walk, but he didn’t like to walk alone, so he stopped his regular walks when my stepmother contracted Parkinson’s disease and couldn’t walk with him. A “Personal Mobility Vehicle” would have been ideal to help them both. Existing motorized wheelchairs seem like the answer. Unfortunately, my stepmother didn’t have the fine motor control to manage a motorized wheelchair. Have you ever tried to walk among a sea of motorized wheelchairs driven by seniors? They are heavy and jerk – you fear for your ankles and knees.

Adding autonomous control to these motorized wheelchairs could overcome these challenges to provide safe, personal mobility to millions of seniors and others who are challenged in moving about. Fortunately, the electronics needed to enable autonomous travel are already available and inexpensive, developed for devices from cellphones to drones to smart watches. Existing motorized wheelchairs have a number of drawbacks: they are expensive, heavy, and awkward. But these were designed as “wheelchairs,” so they need to provide support for all manner of disabilities and be comfortable all day. Most seniors don’t need all those features, they just need to get from one place to another, and then stand up, or move to another chair or sofa or bed.

So what we need is really an Autonomous Chair. Instead of using a motorized wheelchair all day, a senior might only need an Autonomous Chair for a few minutes a day. And because the chair can move autonomously, when a person finishes it can go serve the needs of someone else, sort of like Uber. This means the cost of the Autonomous Chair can be shared among many people. My father lived at Charlestown, an excellent senior facility in Catonsville Maryland, for many years.

Charlestown is built on the site of a former Jesuit Seminary. Buildings have been added and connected together, sort of like a donut, with attractive trees and landscaping in the middle, and even a creek running though. Now more than 3,000 people live there. My father liked to walk inside around the perimeter of the complex, and could go for over a mile without retracing his steps, or even covering the same area on different floors. Thus Charlestown had a linear density of almost 1 person per foot – we’ll come back to this when we look at Communities and Cities.

My observations at Charlestown showed that most seniors would need an Autonomous Chair between 20 - 60 minutes per day. Thus the cost could be shared among perhaps 20 people, so a $1,000 device would only cost each user about $50, which brings the cost of travel to a few cents per trip.

This thinking led us to a family of Autonomous Vehicles for personal mobility in different situations: brief trips, longer trips, and even emergencies. Note the Autonomous Gurney would help in hospitals and all sorts of emergency situations, speeding emergency care and reducing costs and waiting times.

These advantages extend to children who could travel safely without needing someone else to drive them places. I appreciate my daughter’s excellent comments on my drafts: one important issue she flagged here is privacy and personal safety while traveling, especially for children. Automobiles address this by allowing you to lock yourself inside, so consider an enclosed Privacy Container that you can lock from the inside.

Another issue my daughter raised about these vehicles is cleaning and sanitary conditions.

Story: At Burning Man last year, we stayed in a very nice RV that we rented. It was comfortable and did a good job of insulating us from the desert environment … until the wind storm! On the fifth day, the winds grew and grew, so tents were flapping, and loose items were flying by. Then the dust started. It got so that we couldn’t even see the tent next door – later our neighbors asked us to move our RV to block the wind for their tent camp. We thought we were safe inside … until we started to notice that the air was getting thick, and dust was collecting on every surface. We rushed to tape around all the windows, but that didn’t stop the dust that literally piled up on the widow sills. After the storm we spent hours with moist paper towels trying to get up all the dust – not sure if even a vacuum cleaner would have managed the dust because it was so fine. On our way back to civilization we stopped at an RV park, and they wouldn’t let us enter until we took the RV to a truck cleaning service nearby; where they spent an hour spraying the outside of the RV over and over again. So we can vouch for the need for automated cleaning.

Because these vehicles are autonomous, we can send them to a cleaning facility any time it’s needed, sort of like an automated car wash, but on the inside too. The Roomba is an excellent start – I use one frequently at home – but we need to extend the capabilities beyond just floors. We can also use sensors to determine when something needs to be cleaned, and how thoroughly, for example, does it need to be dusted, washed, or sterilized. These innovations of sensing, cleaning, and other functions are crucial for many applications, and we’ll come back to them many times as we talk about different uses.