SAN ANTONIO – University of Texas at San Antonio researchers are turning electric scooters into data collectors. Researchers created computer sensors to attach to scooters to collect data including motion, temperature and location data.
“The goal is to collect this data to provide it to scientists around the world to advance research in areas like machine learning, artificial intelligence, urban planning and civil engineering,” Murtuza Jadliwala, associate professor of Computer Science at UTSA said.
Jadliwala is leading the project called “Scooterlab.”
“There’s a funny story. This project was born when I was walking on the UTSA main campus and was almost hit by these micro-mobility scooters and I was like we need to put them to better use,” Jadliwala said.
The project recently received a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Jadliwala is collaborating with co-principal investigators Greg Griffin, associate professor in the UTSA Department of Urban and Regional Planning.
“We’ve already been contacted and working with people as far away as Australia and as close by as Texas A&M who are interested in deploying research studies with this testbed,” Griffin said.
Next year, students and staff will be seeing the scooters on campus. If you want to use them, you will need to sign a liability waiver and a waiver allowing researchers to collect the data.