Media Lab’s Smart Cities
The new intelligence of cities resides in the increasingly effective combination of digital telecommunication networks (the nerves), ubiquitously embedded intelligence (the brains), sensors and tags (the sensory organs), and software (the knowledge and cognitive competence). This does not exist in isolation from other urban systems, or connected to them only through human intermediaries. There is a growing web of direct connections to the mechanical and electrical systems of buildings, household appliances, production machinery, process plants, transportation systems, electrical grids and other energy supply networks, water supply and waste removal networks, systems that provide life safety and security, and management systems for just about every imaginable human activity. Furthermore, the cross-connections among these systems —both horizontal and vertical— are growing.
City Car promises very high levels of personal mobility at low cost, and effectively complements transit systems by, among other things, efficiently solving the “last mile” problem. This project illustrates the growing potential of ubiquitously embedded intelligence and networking to revolutionize the ways we design and operate buildings and cities. The crucial enabling technology of the City Car is an omnidirectional robot wheel that has been developed. This wheel contains an electric drive motor, suspension, steering, and braking. It is fully drive-by-wire, with just an electric cable and a data cable going in, and there is a simple, snap-on mechanical connection to the chassis.
This highly modularized vehicle architecture, together with elimination of the traditional engine and drive train, offers great flexibility in design of the body and interior. It has taken advantage of this to create small, lightweight passenger vehicles that fold and stack like shopping carts at the supermarket or luggage carts at the airport. The independent, omnidirectional wheels provide extraordinary maneuverability; cars can spin on their own wheelbases instead of making u-turns, and can parallel park by slipping in sideways. Depending upon context, it can parked six to eight folded and stacked City Cars in one traditional parking space.
Although City Cars can work quite nicely as privately owned vehicles, they provide the greatest sustainability benefits when they are integrated into citywide, intelligently coordinated, shared-use mobility systems. The idea is to locate stacks of city cars at major origin and destination points, such as transit stops, airports, hotels, apartment buildings, supermarkets, convenience stores, universities, hospitals, and so on. You just swipe a credit card, drive a vehicle away from the front of the stack, and return it to the rear of another stack at your final
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