Uber Ventures Beyond Cars, Focuses on Automated Bike and Scooter Technology
Photo: Max Pixel
If you’re familiar with the ride-share company Uber, you might be familiar with its past efforts to advance automated vehicle technology. For 2019, however, the company focusing on new goals, such as applying autonomous technology to its bike and scooter-sharing services.
Just this past weekend during a DIY Robocars meet-up in California, Uber announced a new division: Micromobility Robotics. This branch will help the company’s JUMP group incorporate autonomous technology into the bikes and scooters it provides to the public.
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Uber’s new Jump e-bikes are easier to charge and harder to vandalize ?? https://t.co/aiLNTD0byq @Uber @verge #Bikes #Jumo #UBER #Mobility #SmartCity #MaaS #Solution #Meep #App #Eco #Shared #Future pic.twitter.com/ZwOhg1343A
— meep (@BeMeeper) January 21, 2019
The goal is to use autonomous tech to boost bike and scooter availability while enhancing the overall user experience. This tech would elaborate on the company’s recently-introduced swappable batteries it announced back in December. With automated technology, the bikes and scooters could not only charge themselves by automatically returning to certain checkpoints for a fresh battery, but they would also make the rider’s job even simpler by taking over navigation functions.
Per Digital Trends, the new Micromobility Robotics division is just one step of the company’s goal of establishing an “urban mobility platform.” Per Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, two-wheelers are more suited to urban transportation than vehicles, since they take up less space. For more news about Uber’s commitment to improving urban mobility, read about the company’s SharedStreets Platform collaboration.
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News Sources: TechCrunch, Digital Trends
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