About

MIT Media Lab - City Science

We are a team of researchers from the MIT Media Lab City Science group.

"The City Science research group proposes that new strategies must be found to create the places where people live and work in addition to the mobility systems that connect them, in order to meet the profound challenges of the future. We are investigating how new models for urban architecture and personal vehicles can be more responsive to the unique needs and values of individuals through the application of disentangled systems and smart customization."

Shared autonomous micro-mobility

Rethinking cities is now more imperative than ever, as society faces global challenges such as population growth and climate change. The design of cities can not be abstracted from the design of its mobility system, and, therefore, efficient solutions must be found to transport people and goods throughout the city in an ecological way.

At the City Science group, we envision the cities of the future to be "human-centric", being composed of dense and diverse districts where people can walk or bike from home to school, work, or even shopping. In this new car-less scenario, shared and autonomous micro-mobility systems like the MIT Autonomous Bicycle would work either as a mobility option for short commuting distances or as first- or last-mile solutions in connection to mass transit.

An autonomous bicycle-sharing system would combine the most relevant benefits of vehicle sharing, electrification, autonomy, and micro-mobility, increasing the efficiency and convenience of bicycle-sharing systems and incentivizing more people to bike and enjoy their cities in an environmentally friendly way. Users will be able to call for a bicycle trough an app and a bicycle will drive autonomously to wherever they are. Then, it can be ridden just like a regular bike and once the trip is complete, it will go back to autonomous mode either to pick up its next user, to a charging station, or head towards where demand is predicted to occur.

About this simulator

Due to the uniqueness and radical novelty of introducing autonomous driving technology into shared micro-mobility systems and the inherent complexity of these systems, there is a need to quantify the potential impact of autonomy on feet performance and user experience. This is why we have developed an ad-hoc agent-based simulator that provides an in-depth understanding of the feet behavior of autonomous micro-mobility systems in realistic scenarios, including a rebalancing system based on demand prediction. In addition, it allows to asses the impact of dierent parameters on system efficency and service quality and quantify the extent to which an autonomous system would outperform current non autonomous micro-mobility sharing schemes: station-based and dockless sytems.

Here is our GitHub repo.

We have published a paper that describes the simulation tool related to with much greater detail. In addition, we have also published an article that uses this tool for analyzing the behavior of shared autonomous bicycles as a simulation tool.

Even if for this simulation study we have chosen an autonomous bicycle, it can be used to simulate virtually any kind of micro-mobility systems such as autonomous tricyles (PEV), scooters, or any other vehicle that you might want to design.