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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

My company didn't start with this zero tolerance thing in our minds, but it turns out our self-delivering electric bicycles

That actually sounds like a really interesting concept, one of those ideas that seems obvious only after someone suggests it. What company is this?

Right now, in the Seattle area, we are basically seeing a new littering epidemic in the form of sharable bicycles being left to rust away, unused, at random places. If the bike could cruise to its next user autonomously, that would be really be a game-changer. "Bikes on demand" would turn bikesharing from (IMHO) a stupid idea into something that just might work.

Plus, the engineering challenges involved in automating a riderless bicycle sound fun.

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Weel, we're in Bellevue. It's a super fun problem to work on and one of the first thing we figured out was that trikes won't work because of their width and difficulty to ride, so we got a two-wheeled bike to balance. The autonomy problems are easier than cars in a lot of ways, and this Uber case is something we don't deal with because our bikes can always stop when presented with a no-go situation since we're only autonomous when no one is riding.

That's good to hear, sounds like a very cool project. I could see this living up to at least some of the hype that the original Segways received.

The biggest challenge will probably be to keep people from screwing with the bikes, of course. :( An unoccupied bicycle cruising down the street or sidewalk will fire all sorts of mischievous neurons that onlookers didn't even know they had.

Definitely, will be interesting to test. We have several cameras onboard so that we can see what happened but an equal concern with vandalism is how people feel about being watched. We want to avoid feeling like your neighborhood is suddenly a panopticon. Still unsolved.

How do you (plan to) deal with people trying to stop what looks like a runaway bicycle (esp. when it rolls ^W rides downhill)?

Hah, yeah it reminds me of a runaway shopping cart when you see our bike rolling. We expect people will get used to it eventually but we have some ideas to test in the future on how to make it more obvious, such as giving the bike a ‘face’ and having it lit up with LEDs that are visible from all angles. Def not a solved problem, but as far as design problems go it’s a pretty fun one.

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