Meet the Little Robot That Helps to Fix Sidewalks
There are a myriad of ways in which people have dreamed that robots could change the world. From household tasks, to complex surgery, many of those dreams have come to a semi-fruition stage. Now, robots are being utilized for a job that not many people think of — testing sidewalks for safety and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance.
According to Yahoo! Tech, five cities across the United States — Tyler, Texas, Bangor, Maine, Hoboken, New Jersey, Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Hollister, California — have deployed the three-foot tall Daxbots to survey their sidewalks and test for ADA compliance.
Hoboken Mayor Emily Jabbour told Yahoo! that the city has “consistently invested in making our streets work better for everyone.”
Daxbots
Created by the Oregon company, Daxbot, in 2015, the robots stand 33 inches tall and can run at a top speed of four miles per hour. They can hold a charge of about eight to 12 hours and are trained to yield to pedestrians.
In order to collect the relevant data, the robots are equipped with onboard cameras, GPS, inclinometer sensors, and positioning lasers. In the course of their surveys they data regarding the sidewalk width, vertical changes, curb-ramp conditions, cross slope, and vertical slope of the sidewalks.
These little robots can cover quite a bit of ground. In Tyler, Texas, for instance, the robots covered over 95 miles of sidewalks and trails, 59 transit stops, and 122 signalized intersections. The equivalent work would take a human crew about five to six weeks and in Texas the robots don’t mind rolling around in the hot sun.
Originally Designed for Pizza Delivery
SAN reports that Daxbots were originally built as pizza delivery robots. Then one day, Dax received a call from a city where the robots had been deployed, asking whether they could also potentially collect data on the state of the city’s sidewalks. That’s when the sidewalk project began.
In Tyler, Texas, where the Daxbots were deployed over the summer, they became local celebrities. Residents stopped to take selfies with the little rolling wonders, and the bots occasionally responded with cute vocalizations such as a little, “beeeeyooo”.
But the truth is that the Daxbots are more than just adorable, they do very important work. Traffic accidents kill more than 7,000 pedestrians a year in the United States. In Texas in particular, that number is 770 pedestrians a year, 11 percent of the nationwide total.
Having safe and ADA compliant sidewalks is one way of lowering that number significantly. Pedestrians often find themselves needing to walk in the street due to a lack of safe or accessible sidewalks, and this is especially true for people with mobility aids, such as wheelchairs.
The recruitment of the Daxbot from pizza delivery to infrastructure safety is a lesson in flexibility and creativity. It takes a flexible company to be able to pivot their product from one goal to another, and it takes a creative mind to realize that a given product can do more than what it is currently doing. Sure, pizza delivery is convenient but having safe sidewalks is an issue that involves every resident of urban areas.
