MIT researchers develop self-driving bike that could transform public bike-share schemes (+ videos)

A self-driving bicycle developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could transform public bike-share schemes by achieving big increases in their efficiency through needing smaller fleets according to modelling conducted by the research university’s City Science group.

Bicycles that could travel autonomously to a pick-up location when hailed by a rider through an app, and which then take themselves to another user or to a charging station would require a fleet of bikes 3.5 times smaller than those of docked hire schemes, and eight times smaller than those of dockless ones, they claim.

In one of two papers published last month, the team carried out a detailed modelling of how an autonomous bike-sharing fleet would behave, based on the MIT Autonomous Bicycle Project, which has developed a bike that effectively turns into a tricycle when in self-driving mode to provide additional stability, with the two rear wheels then coming together while being ridden by the rider to give the experience of riding a bike.

Using the city of Boston as a scenario – MIT is located in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts – researchers were able to measure “the extent to which an autonomous system could outperform current bicycle-sharing systems.”

Outlining the basis of the modelling, they said: “This analysis provides a very detailed overview of each system's characteristics, including average trip and waiting times, percentage of served trips, and the utilisation of the bicycles, among many others.

“These results answer some of the most central questions in shared autonomous systems, such as the relationship between the wait times and the fleet size, or the relationship between an autonomous bicycle's speed on system efficiency and user experience.

“Furthermore, the article also assesses the impact of different parameters on system performance by running batch simulations with a range of values for each parameter.

“In addition, this simulation investigates the effects of various operational strategies, including no rebalancing, ideal rebalancing, and a demand-prediction-based rebalancing model.”

MIT’s City Science team says that “results show that with a fleet size 3.5 times smaller than a station-based system and eight times smaller than a dockless system, an autonomous system can improve overall performance and user experience, even with no rebalancing.

“These findings indicate that the remarkable efficiency of an autonomous bicycle-sharing system could compensate for the additional cost of autonomous bicycles.”

The other paper, published like the first in the journal Communications in Transport Research, also explored how autonomous vehicles could help make micro-mobility sharing systems more efficient.

“In the last decade, bike-sharing systems quickly proliferated in cities worldwide,” the researchers noted.

“More recently, other micro-mobility systems such as e-scooters have become a mainstream inner-city transportation mode. However, despite their popularity, shared micro-mobility modes still face several challenges.

“First, due to the uneven user travel patterns, system operators need to rebalance the vehicles throughout the city in vans or trucks, which has a very high economic and ecological impact.

“Second, due to the low costs of the vehicles and the market's competitiveness in dockless systems, operators flood cities with vehicles exceeding the capacity of the urban infrastructure and generating many urban and environmental problems.”

 The team said that introducing autonomy to such schemes would make them “more efficient and convenient,” for a number of reasons.

“In the first place, autonomous vehicles would rebalance themselves solving the rebalancing problem for system operators and, by being more efficient, could mitigate the current vehicle oversupply challenges,” they wrote.

“At the same time, autonomy could allow shared micro-mobility systems to work as a mobility-on-demand service. This means bringing the convenience of systems like Uber or Lyft into sustainable modes of transportation.

“In an autonomous shared micro-mobility system, trips would occur as follows: A user would request a ride through a mobile app, and an autonomous vehicle would drive to the user's location. While waiting, the users can enjoy their time for other purposes instead of being on the street trying to find an available vehicle.

“Once the vehicle arrives, the user would ride to their desired destination. Then, upon arrival at the destination, the vehicle would drive autonomously to pick up another user, to a charging station, or towards wherever the demand is predicted to occur.

“This improved user experience could incentivize more people to use micro-mobility systems as their preferred trip mode and allow more people to travel around their cities in environmentally friendly ways,” they added.

We’ve covered the concept of self-driving bicycles here on road.cc before, including back in 2016 – although that turned out to be an April Fool’s joke from Google.

> Google’s self-driving bicycle: bike or fiction?

Six years on, however, and MIT’s research suggests that what might have been put forward back then to pull the legs of the unwary could actually have traction in real life.

The issue is already being explored by operators including Uber, whose Jump bike and scooter hire division, which subsequently bought rival operator Lime, was recruiting personnel to work on autonomous micro-mobility back in 2019.

> Uber developing electric bikes and scooters that can ‘drive’ themselves