Irish smart-scooter technology company Luna is working with California-based JumpWatts to combine teleoperation and computer vision technology to improve the safety of shared electric scooters.

The companies are planning a pilot project in the Smart DCU Campus in Dublin to test the operational efficiency for riders, pedestrians, operators and cities.

The partnership aims to provide a solution to the escalating global problem of e-scooters being in the wrong location relative to user demand and cluttering footpaths, leading to inconvenience and hazards, particularly for wheelchair users and the visually impaired.

JumpWatts, a micromobility teleoperations start-up, has created Virtual Valet, a suite of technologies that allows any e-scooter to right itself if tipped-over, remotely re-position itself to a designated parking zone, and be summoned by riders to a specific location.

“The micromobility space is ripe for innovations that not only improve the bottom line for fleet operators, but also create a better experience for users and municipalities,” said Arun Gunasekaran, CEO of JumpWatts. “Our vehicle enhancement technology, Virtual Valet, is just that, a way to increase profitability and decrease chaos in the streets. Our Virtual Valet technology can be retrofitted to enhance existing fleets or designed into vehicles for direct integration, leading to a 95% reduction in sidewalk nuisances and up to 40% increase in fleet profitability. Utilising Luna’s advanced computer vision software alongside our offering provides best in class situational awareness for our remote repositioning systems.”

Luna provides computer-vision technology for shared micromobility operators to tackle the issues associated with e-scooter rental schemes, such as footpath and pavement riding, pedestrian collision, and improper parking.

“We are very excited to announce our collaboration with JumpWatts,” said Andrew Fleury, CEO of Luna. “We are both working towards similar goals of addressing safety for electric scooters and we believe that together we can accelerate our companies’ joint objectives. The issue of e-scooter footpath clutter is one that is currently hampering numerous cities and towns across the world. Luna believes that the combined technologies of Luna and JumpWatts will help to address this issue and offer a solution that will be compelling for both operators and cities alike.”

By combining both companies’ technologies in this pilot project, it is envisaged that the adoption of shared e-scooter schemes will accelerate greatly by solving key safety and governance problems being identified by city authorities across the globe. JumpWatts’ teleoperation and autonomous technology combined with Luna’s vision technology could make fleet operations more cost effective for operators and make dockless micromobility more attractive to cities.

The semi-autonomous fleets enabled by this collaboration will also be able to collect smart city data ranging from road condition monitoring and crowd analytics to traffic congestion alerts and kerbside management applications. The joint technologies will be tested in partnership with Smart DCU, a district of Smart Dublin. Smart Dublin is an initiative founded by the four Dublin local authorities, with the goal of future-proofing the Dublin region by testing and scaling innovations for a wide range of local challenges.

Luna began as a collaborative innovation project in the Intel-Movidius Edge AI accelerator programme in DCU in 2019. It provides computer vision and edge AI to manage deployment and operation of shared micromobility fleets. This allows an e-scooter to understand if it is operating in a heavily pedestrianised area and how to react accordingly.

The technology also equips e-scooters to detect the kind of lane or surface they are riding on – bike lane, footpath, road – and react accordingly depending on an operator and/or the city’s safety parameters. Luna is also developing algorithms and analytics tools that will let scooter operators and cities gain insights into how the urban realm is performing, for both citizens and businesses.

JumpWatts is a Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator portfolio company and Grid110 Accelerator alumnus.

Smart DCU is a collaborative testbed initiative between Dublin City Council and partners Enable, Insight and DCU Alpha. Its goal is to develop, test and trial technology innovations emerging from partners based in DCU Alpha and elsewhere, through leveraging the IoT and data analytics capabilities of Enable and Insight.