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As a mobility of future, the popularity of personal mobility vehicles (PMs) is rapidly increasing worldwide. However, this boom in the use of PMs has resulted in a substantial number of accidents involving not only PM users but also other road users including pedestrians, bicyclists, and motor vehicle drivers. This study aims to explore the potential risk factors for the occurrence of PM-related accidents and the resulting injury severity using the Traffic Accident Analysis System (TAAS) of South Korea between 2017 and 2019. We found that PM–pedestrian accidents tend to occur on roads with wider sidewalks and bike lanes, possibly because the pedestrian–PM conflict increases in this road condition. There is still ongoing debate on whether it is appropriate for PMs to share the sidewalk with pedestrians. Some countries, including Korea, prohibit the use of PMs on sidewalks; however, in reality, this regulation is not well-observed because using PMs on roadways involves higher crash risk with motor vehicles. This study suggests one potential solution to ensure safety of PM users: expansion of bike lane infrastructure having physically separated bike lanes and sidewalks/motorways in addition to the formation and strict enforcement of appropriate safety rules for PM users.

Obstacles such as ramps, steps, and irregular floor surfaces are commonly encountered in homes, offices, and other public spaces. These obstacles frequently limit the daily activities of people who use mobility aids. For this purpose, this study solves a slope minimization problem for personal mobility aids. As a solution approach, a gradient-reduction scheme is proposed, which allows existing mobility aids to reduce the required horizontal forces and vibrations when ascending steps while maintaining their wheel sizes. Practically, an axle-transitional wheel mechanism realizing the gradient-reduction computation model is established, and its step-ascending wheel prototype is developed. Specifically, since the proposed wheel enables integration into existing personal mobility-assisting devices, two functional roles, such as rolling and step ascending, can be used. The developed step-climbing wheel can help the users of mobility aids mitigate the aforementioned limitations. The physical and mental burdens of caregivers and medical staff can also be reduced by making the users of the gradient-reduction scheme more self-sufficient. This study provides details on the axle-transitional wheel mechanism and its step-ascending wheel prototype. The findings are analyzed mathematically, and their functionality is verified through extensive experiments using a prototype.

Safety and stability of the unicycle robots are critical for their operation, and hence they must be tested for such aspects. However, the objectivity and repeatability of the tests cannot be guaranteed with human operators, and some tests under certain conditions cannot even be run at all due to the safety of the operator. To solve this problem, we propose an ATD (anthropomorphic test device) capable of reproducing the human rider’s behavior on the unicycle robot. An ATD is designed to have two prismatic joints to implement the change of center of gravity of the human operator in forward/backward and lateral direction. The reference profiles for two prismatic joints of the ATD that guarantee the same dynamic effect with the human rider’s behavior are designed using a cascade control loop in consideration of dynamic interaction between the reference trajectories and the unicycle robot dynamics. A sliding mode controller was designed and implemented to control the prismatic joints such that ATD mimics the human rider’s motion intent accurately and thereby the unicycle robot could be driven by the ATD as human operator drives. Feasibility of the proposed ATD was verified through computer simulations.

The emergence of micromobility services in the form of dockless shared e-scooters has resulted in a wide range of behavioral changes in urban environments. In order to effectively steer these changes towards sustainability targets, the characteristics of e-scooter trips and users’ behaviors should be understood further. However, there is a lack of systematic literature reviews in this domain. To address this gap, we provide a two-fold systematic literature review. The first aspect focuses on the categorization of temporal and spatial patterns of shared e-scooter usage. The second aspect focuses on a deeper understanding of e-scooter users’ behaviors, utilizing the principles of persona design. The analysis of temporal patterns highlights the commonality of midday, evening, and weekend peak usage across cities, while spatial patterns suggest e-scooters are used for traveling to recreational and educational land use, as well as city center areas. The synthesis of findings on users’ behaviors has resulted in six categories, with four user types based on usage frequency (one time, casual, power, and non-adopters), and two motivation-based personas (users who are not satisfied with current mobility options and users who have had positive travel experience from e-scooter usage). The overall findings provide important lessons for evaluating this emerging mobility service, which should be considered for steering its development in public-private stakeholder networks.

The popularity of rideshare electric scooters is due to their availability, accessibility, and low cost. The recent increase in electric scooter use has raised concerns regarding the safety of both riders and pedestrians. Previous studies characterize the incidence and pattern of injury for riders, but there is a lack of literature concerning electric scooters' impact on pedestrians. Pedestrians injured by electric scooters face potential financial burdens from hospitalization costs, medical interventions, taking time off from work, and rehabilitation therapies. Based on prior studies, pedestrians who are most prone to injuries sustained by pedestrian transportation include individuals with vision and/or hearing impairment, young children, the elderly, and people distracted by mobile devices. We present a case involving a sixty-year-old female pedestrian who presented to the emergency department with an acute lumbar compression fracture after a collision with an electric scooter. This study highlights the safety risks and incidence of injuries for pedestrians associated with electric scooters, which can help shape public policy to ensure the safety of both riders and pedestrians.

Mobility is fundamental for human beings. In the current society, many personal mobility solutions have been invented to enable more time-efficient mobility, such as self-balancing vehicles, electric unicycles, and electric scooters. Personal mobility devices can provide flexibility to transportation. However, most personal mobility devices need to be carried by their users in the case that they climb stairs and steps. Therefore, many researchers have focused on developing stair-climbing vehicles, but due to the complicated mechanism, these devices are usually huge and heavy. To realize a new type of personal mobility device with more flexibility, we proposed a novel concept of a personal mobility device design that combines the agile mobility of a wheel type mechanism but does not limit a human’s natural stair climbing ability. In this study, we introduced a compact personal mobility device, namely WeMo, under the concept of “wearing mobility”, which extends humans’ mobility in daily life. The developed hardware realizes “walking mode” and “driving mode”. Users can move with the motorized driven wheels of the device during driving mode, and users can walk on their feet without any interference from the device during walking mode. In this manuscript, the detailed design of the hardware and control strategy were explained first.Then, we conducted fundamental user tests and discussed the ability of the developed device from test results. Finally, the conclusions and future work were provided.

Nowadays, the diffusion of electric-powered micro Personal Mobility Vehicles (e-PMVs) worldwide—i.e., e-bikes, e-scooters, and self-balancing vehicles—has disrupted the urban transport sector. Furthermore, this topic has captured many scholars and practitioners’ interest due to multiple issues related to their use. Over the past five years, there has been strong growth in the publication of e-PMV studies. This paper reviews the existing literature by identifying several issues on the impact that e-PMVs produce from different perspectives. More precisely, by using the PRIMA’s methodological approach and well-known scientific repositories (i.e., Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar), 90 studies between 2014 and 2020 were retrieved and analyzed. An overview and classification into endogenous issues (e.g., impact on transport and urban planning) and exogenous issues (e.g., impact on safety and the environment) are provided. While several issues are deeply investigated, the findings suggest that some others need many improvements. Therefore, the status quo of these studies is being assessed to support possible future developments.

Increased use of e-powered personal mobility vehicles is usually considered to be a positive change, while it is generally agreed that Personal Mobility Vehicles (PMVs) effectively and efficiently reduce the negative environmental impacts of transport and improve quality of life. There has been great technological progress made by all sectors in the field of personal mobility during the last decade. The use of PMVs for micro-mobility have been welcomed by the market, consumers, and governments and thus they are becoming increasingly popular in modern European society. New technology-driven PMVs provide opportunities to their users, but at the same time create problems with street space sharing, road safety, and traffic offenses. This study gives an overview of recent types of PMVs, offers some insights into upcoming changes and challenges, and raises a discussion on themes related to the increased use of e-powered personal transporters.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide managers from traditional industries with a blueprint to systematically analyze and discover digital business models and, thus, better cope with the digital transformation of their industrial businesses. Design/methodology/approach The proposed blueprint is built on state-of-the-art research on digital business model innovation and a rigorous taxonomy-building approach. The process is demonstrated through a simplified case study of a passenger transport company. Findings The process involves three steps: identifying existing products and services, deconstructing business models and discovering new configurations. The managers from the case company very positively evaluated the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed procedure. Originality/value The proven methodology relates the generic components of digital business models to a specific firm’s context, listing the solution space for each relevant dimension. The resulting framework aids in better understanding the existing business models and serves as a tool for the systematic discovery of new models.

This paper presents the state-of-the-art and reviews the state-of-research of acoustic sensors used for a variety of navigation and guidance applications on air and surface vehicles. In particular, this paper focuses on echolocation, which is widely utilized in nature by certain mammals (e.g., cetaceans and bats). Although acoustic sensors have been extensively adopted in various engineering applications, their use in navigation and guidance systems is yet to be fully exploited. This technology has clear potential for applications in air and surface navigation/guidance for intelligent transport systems (ITS), especially considering air and surface operations indoors and in other environments where satellite positioning is not available. Propagation of sound in the atmosphere is discussed in detail, with all potential attenuation sources taken into account. The errors introduced in echolocation measurements due to Doppler, multipath and atmospheric effects are discussed, and an uncertainty analysis method is presented for ranging error budget prediction in acoustic navigation applications. Considering the design challenges associated with monostatic and multi-static sensor implementations and looking at the performance predictions for different possible configurations, acoustic sensors show clear promises in navigation, proximity sensing, as well as obstacle detection and tracking. The integration of acoustic sensors in multi-sensor navigation systems is also considered towards the end of the paper and a low Size, Weight and Power, and Cost (SWaP-C) sensor integration architecture is presented for possible introduction in air and surface navigation systems.