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U of M's MCity To Feature Asimov's Automatobuses
The University of Michigan's MCity - an autonomous vehicle testing ground - will be getting some entirely autonomous shuttle buses for traveling around "town".
(MCity driverless shuttle)
You don't have to adjust your volume--that's how low the engine of the 15-passenger, autonomous shuttle will sound. It will transport passengers along a two-mile route that connects the North Campus Research Complex with the engineering campus.Huei Peng is Director of MCity. He says they're doing this for research.
"We want to see how they are being used. Are they helping with the local mobility? Is there any issues that we didn't think about? So the learning experience will collect data helping us to understand human acceptance, human behavior."
Two all-electric shuttles from the French manufacturer NAVYA will be used.
(MCity driverless shuttle)
Science fiction great Isaac Asimov, in his intriguing 1953 short story Sally, describes driverless shuttle buses and gives insight to engineers about just what they are dealing with; he called them automatobuses.
Via WEMU. Update 11-Nov-2023: As far as I know, the first science fiction writers to describe this idea, which they called an autobus were Stanley G. and Helen Weinbaum in the short story Tidal Moon:
THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold, it was certainly preferable to traveling by hipp.
(Read more about autobus)
End update.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/30/2017)
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