Gadgetory

the automated shuttles we're using in our trials are designed for first mile and last mile mobility that means connecting residential areas to transport and commercial hubs and that means elderly disabled users can engage in independent mobility it also means that existing residents might choose to use public transport rather than get into a privately owned vehicle and have a better and safer cleaner journey the technology the vehicle uses is based on range of different sensors primarily its vision based but it's used it uses a lidar map of the environment a laser based 3d map of the environment to understand and learn or it needs to navigate in order to complete its journey and here in Greenwich they'll be operating in an unsecured gated environment so they need additional software and sensors to be able to do that that additional technology is coming from a company called rocks bots occur in order to prepare the route for navigation by the shuttle vehicles octa botique have gone through a process of creating a 3d laser point cloud of the environment that means taking a vehicle equipped with lasers around the routes we like the vehicles to travel it uses that point cloud to learn the route and then its cameras to navigate and localize once the room is complete as you can probably expect we're going to great lengths to ensure the safety of our trials so we're doing a lot around the preparation of the route so we understand what our potential risks where we likely to encounter pedestrians at emerging suddenly or cyclists emerging suddenly from the route and we can control the behavior of the vehicle in those particular environments and we've only done some limited demonstration trials so far but in those limited demonstrations we've seen people are initially slightly anxious perhaps you're unsure about how the vehicle is going to behave but when they see that the vehicle behaves in a very predictable way a very safe way it breaks and steers as they would expect they learn to enjoy it very very quickly and I think that's what we'll see in our trials these automated shuttles if they work successfully in Greenwich and we expect them to with I can be delivering automated services in cities in the next couple of years it will be a long time though before we can see automated vehicles that can do all of the journeys that a human driver is currently capable of performing so there's lots of development work to be done you