Alternative Vehicle Forms

Ideas for autonomous golf carts, tuktuks, bicycle carriers, low-speed electric vehicles for last-mile transportation at train stations

Modern autonomous perception technology holds immense potential far beyond the traditional passenger car, promising to revolutionize robotics in sectors ranging from manufacturing to space exploration. Visionaries advocate for a shift toward diverse vehicle scales, such as autonomous tuktuks and golf carts, which could utilize dedicated low-speed lanes at train stations to bridge the gap in last-mile transportation. As industry leaders like Waymo solidify their dominance through advanced sensor technology, creative suggestions even include modular solutions, such as using tow hitches to grant autonomous capabilities to conventional vehicles.

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Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.

In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc

Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.

The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.

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Add a tow hitch to Waymos and any car can be autonomous!

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