Scared to ride? These e-scooters drive themselves to be cleaned.
Bike- and scooter-sharing isn't as compelling as it used to be, so companies are stepping up cleaning procedures. One scooter rental company is launching an extensive sanitization program in an Atlanta suburb with remote-controlled autonomous scooters.
Go X e-scooters teamed up with Tortoise to put its autonomous-capable software and cameras on its fleet in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. Starting Wednesday, a six-month pilot will send the scooters on their own to a cleaning hub after a rider rents a scooter. A cleaning crew will disinfect the scooter and then send it off where it'll be ready for another ride request, with a sticker to indicate it's been properly cleaned. Users rent scooters like usual through an app.
Go X and Tortoise are starting with six cleaning hubs throughout the city and will add more over time. Initially there'll be 100 scooters that can drive themselves to and from hubs (at low speeds).
Dmitry Shevelenko, a co-founder of Tortoise, said in a phone call that the retrofitted scooters are similar to self-driving cars in that a vehicle that already exists (in Peachtree Corners Go X's Apollo scooters are Xiaomi Mi M365 electric scooters) gets additional abilities by adding sensors, cameras, and other tech. Tortoise relies mostly on cameras like those in most Android smartphones to control the two-wheelers.
For now Tortoise is sticking to remote-controlled operations, which look autonomous if you're a passerby on the street.
"A directly accountable human is always in control," Shevelenko said. The company focuses on low-speed repositioning of low-weight vehicles, like e-scooters, hence the name "tortoise." Its vehicles never go any faster than 5 mph, so latency issues with controlling the device from afar on a 4G network don't come up.
Shevelenko expects to add more autonomous features and operate scooters as a hybrid with both remote-control and self-driving options. For now, the e-scooters are all tele-operated, meaning someone is remote controlling the device (now from their homes since the coronavirus outbreak shut down any control centers) and moving it through a parking lot or across a busy intersection. Uber's scooter company Jump (which is now part of Lime as part of restructuring) was previously looking into advanced features like pavement detection, but that project is now canceled.
"We never anticipated it would be so relevant," Shevelenko explained about touchless, remote-controlled repositioning tech during a pandemic.
Shevelenko called e-scooters an essential resource for many workers who need to get around even during a pandemic. In that vein, San Francisco e-scooter rental company Scoot is returning to city streets on Wednesday after pausing service while riders stayed at home. Scoot will also ramp up its cleaning efforts with new requirements from crews on the street after rides, but don't expect any self-driving scooters.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
