Public mobile robots – why your city is likely not ready…
Cities – American, Asian, Canadian, European – face an unusual situation. Part opportunity and part threat, public mobile robots (PMRs), such as delivery and maintenance robots, promise astonishing advantages while posing very complex infrastructural, social, and public space conundrums.
I have engaged intensively with numerous questions of deployment for these devices over the past three years: traffic, regulation, pedestrians, accessibility, safety, robot-to-human communication, monetisation, and many other interrelated topics that interact in unprecedented ways. Some of these have no analogue from which we can learn.
There are two factors no city has faced before…
First is the introduction of unmanned, commercial motorised devices/machines intermixed among pedestrians in public spaces. Our past experience with unmanned machines has been in factories, fields, mines, warehouses, and war. Our experience with devices in pedestrianised spaces has, until now, always involved proximate human operators in direct, hands-on control: bikes, dollies, push-carts, strollers, skateboards, etc. Except for some assistive devices such as wheelchairs, few have been motorised.
The tiny, cheap, electric hub motor has changed that. Among all the e-bikes, scooters, e-skateboards, etc. vying for active space, PMRs, originally engineered to operate in structured workspaces among trained, paid, collaborating humans, are now poised to operate among non-involved humans and in relatively unstructured environments. But this time without requiring a directly accompanying human to operate them.
The second factor never faced before is a requirement for traffic orchestration applied to unaccompanied machines operated by multiple, independent actors navigating in weakly-structured spaces.
The two most common traffic orchestration systems we have experience with are [1] air traffic control with its stringent rules and safety-critical flight planning and [2] road-traffic systems for motor vehicles with its signs, signals, markings, and enforcement.
Both of these historical systems are complex, extensive, expensive and fairly highly structured. Their equivalent is entirely missing for PMRs. And neither air traffic control nor road traffic systems can help significantly with PMRs because the ground traffic control for PMRs will be entirely digital. Entirely V2I. Unlike air traffic, urban ground traffic experiences an enormous amount of spatial competition and tolerates many millions of crashes and well over a million fatalities annually, and unlike roadway motor traffic with its 125 years of traffic orchestration experience, PMRs must operate in significantly less-structured environments that have no history of traffic orchestration.
Coupled with these two novel system characteristics, many jurisdictions are poised to regulate PMRs under a governance regime in which small size and slow speed fall into a regulatory blind spot (Canada is one such country with that issue). As small, slow devices such as e-bikes, scooters or PMRs grow in variety, speed, popularity, and capability to increasingly move passengers and goods and perform uncountable numbers of tasks, they will increasingly tend to invade bike lanes, crosswalks, road shoulders and sidewalks. Hence, setting a regulatory filter based on speed and weight leaves our cities and communities exposed to considerable impacts, not all of which are positive.
While we can expect municipalities to develop by-laws or bans for the use and behaviour of PMRs, the Urban Robotics Foundation (URF) has set out to ensure the groundwork for a degree of common regulatory structure among jurisdictions. The URF does that by drafting international standards – currently for the ISO. Of course, standards are voluntary and are not themselves regulations. At best, they are used as models, providing normative language and procedures as well as informative frameworks for jurisdictions to develop regulations, whether for safety, enforcement, registration, traffic orchestration, or monetisation.
Please understand that the PMR of 2022-2030 with its fledgling driving automation system (SAE3016) is almost certainly on its way to an astonishing level of capability and an enormous repertoire of task competencies. But today, and for the rest of this decade, these devices will seldom be smarter than a 10-year-old pedestrian, and they will not be smarter than a skilled, rule-following, attentive car-and-driver duo in that timeframe.
The URF takes advantage of collaboration among numerous stakeholders in order to encourage and accelerate a successful migration from large-vehicle logistics and maintenance services to smaller, nimbler, cleaner last-mile devices and maintenance services over this decade and the next several.
For the URF’s commercial members, our service is focused on helping industries such as infrastructure planners, logistics operators and planners, robot manufacturers, traffic systems providers, last-mile shippers such as warehouse, retail and dark retail and maintenance-service provider to anticipate and plan for the coming disruption in innovation and deployment of robotic devices in public spaces.
For public authorities and NGOs, our service is focused on helping jurisdictions such as cities, states, provinces and countries as well as NGOs that defend the liveability and accessibility interests of pedestrians and cyclists in regard to safety, personal mobility and active transportation wherever public mobile robots are permitted to operate. The URF helps these stakeholders anticipate and plan for user safety and access rights during the coming disruption in innovation and deployment of robotic devices in public, shared spaces.
To be active during the development of safety, regulatory, operating, orchestration, and behavioural standards means greater assurance that these technologies will meet with appropriate municipal regulation and user acceptance to ensure and increase the safety and social value of these technologies as well as the likelihood of commercial and urban success.
If your city has cars, sidewalks and pedestrians, this work matters to you.
This article is authored by Bern Grush, executive director of the Urban Robotics Foundation, a non-profit, Canadian organisation that brings together municipal, corporate and academic partners to ensure robotic technology is implemented in a way that is beneficial for all users. It is currently developing the ISO 4448 series, a standard that sets the parameters and procedures for automated motor vehicles at the curbside, and the movement of robotic service vehicles within pedestrian spaces.
