Autonomous personal mobility scooter for multi-class mobility-on-demand service

In this paper, we describe the design and development of an autonomous personal mobility scooter that was used in public trials during the 2016 MIT Open House, for the purpose of raising public awareness and interest about autonomous vehicles. The scooter is intended to work cooperatively with other classes of autonomous vehicles such as road cars and golf cars to improve the efficacy of mobility-on-demand transportation solutions. The scooter is designed to be robust, reliable, and safe, while operating under prolonged durations. The flexibility in fleet expansion is shown by replicating the system architecture and sensor package that has been previously implemented in a road car and golf cars. We show that the vehicle performed robustly with small localization variance. A survey of the users shows that the public is very receptive to the concept of the autonomous personal mobility device.