Autonomous vehicles for micro-mobility

Autonomous vehicles have been envisioned for more than 100 years. One of the first suggestions was a front cover of Scientific America back in 1916. Today, it is possible to get cars that drive autonomously for extended distances. We are also starting to see micro-mobility solutions, such as the Nuro vehicles for pizza delivery. Building autonomous cars that can operate in urban environments with a diverse set of road-users is far from trivial. Early 2018 the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego launched an effort to build a full stack autonomous vehicle for micro-mobility. The motivations were diverse: i) development of a system for operation in an environment with many pedestrians, ii) design of a system that does not rely on dense maps (or HD-maps as they are sometimes named), iii) design strategies to build truly robust systems, and iv) a framework to educate next-generation engineers. In this paper, we present the research effort of design, prototyping, and evaluation of such a vehicle. From the evaluation, several research directions are explored to account for shortcomings. Lessons and issues for future work are additionally drawn from this work.