Collaborative Research: CCRI: New: ScooterLab - A Programmable and Participatory Sensing Testbed using Micromobility Vehicles

University Of Texas At San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

Micromobility vehicles, such as battery-powered e-scooters, are rapidly gaining popularity in urban communities. Yet they also present significant safety, user privacy, infrastructure, and planning challenges that must be addressed. The research community –including computer and data scientists, engineers, and urban planners– has started responding to these challenges, but the progress has been ad hoc and slow. This can be primarily attributed to a lack of micromobility infrastructure for collecting diverse rider, mobility, and contextual data in realistic settings and environments. There is a critical need for a large-scale and easily accessible research instrument to enable such data collection. To this end, this project will design, develop, deploy, and manage ScooterLab, a community research infrastructure comprising a highly customizable fleet of micromobility vehicles. These battery-operated vehicles will be retrofitted with heterogeneous sensing and remote communication and control capabilities to crowd-sense data related to riders’ mobility, context, and environment, enabling research at the confluence of (1) multiple computing disciplines, including machine learning, computer vision, image processing, high-performance computing, big data analytics, and privacy-enhancing technologies; and (2) (micro)mobility, urban planning, and transportation research. The project will provide community researchers with well-designed and usable web interfaces for requesting the deployment of customized sensing experiments and for accessing carefully curated datasets from past experiments and trials. The project will also conduct periodic community outreach and engagement activities, including workshops to promote the testbed’s use and share the outcomes of research activities enabled by the testbed data. ScooterLab vehicles, besides providing a convenient, electric option to its participants, will serve as excellent instruments to crowd-sense fine-grained, multi-sensor scientific data, enabling new research breakthroughs in Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and other interdisciplinary domains. By empowering NSF CISE and other research communities to openly access these scientific datasets, the ScooterLab testbed will engender transformative advancements. Successful development and deployment of ScooterLab will transform micromobility-related and micromobility-supported research at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), the University of Oklahoma (OU), and other collaborating organizations and institutes of higher education. ScooterLab will improve opportunities nationally for attracting and sustaining CISE, engineering, urban planning, and policy faculty and students working on emerging intelligent transportation and mobility solutions. The ScooterLab testbed will also serve as a foundational research instrument for UTSA’s recently launched School of Data Science located in downtown San Antonio, and contribute to the university’s initiatives to reduce its carbon emissions. As a Minority-Serving Institution (59% Hispanic and 53% Female), UTSA will provide extensive research and participation opportunities for people of color and women. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.