During our time at Marian Grove Retirement Village, we learned many lessons about the future of passenger transport when it comes to regional communities and the elderly.
Residents from the village appeared in a video to discuss their thoughts on driverless vehicles and what they thought of the BusBot Project. To watch the video, click here.
The Coffs Harbour Automated Vehicle Trial ‘BusBot’ has been awarded the Automated Vehicle Award at the annual Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) Australia National Awards 2019.
The prestigious award program is now in its 10th year with nominees for each award category determined by a ten-person judging panel made up of ITS professionals, representing industry, government and academia.
More info here.
BusBot made its way down from Coffs Harbour to Sydney for the the 4th International Driverless Vehicle Summit (IDVS4) in October, held at Olympic Park. The event showcases a range of autonomous vehicles and several presentations and panels are held to discuss future transport.
Before the summit, BusBot stopped outside Transport for NSW offices in Sydney CBD for employees to have a chat about the trial and have a look at the vehicle up close.
October saw the BusBot Roadshow begin.
The vehicle featured as a main attraction at St Augustine’s Primary School in Coffs Harbour where over 500 students learnt about the vehicle firsthand. In a round-robin format, students were informed about our trial and our objectives and about the vehicle specifications and technology.
BusBot also featured at Park Beach Plaza where hundreds of shoppers were able to stop, take a look inside the vehicle and have their say on driverless vehicles in the future by filling out the BusBot Community Perception Survey.
Phase 2 of our automated vehicle trial, dubbed the BusBot trial, officially signed off in August 2019.
The village proved to be a valuable use case for the 6-month automated vehicle phase. The BusBot Trial was the first in the world to provide an on-demand service in an independent living village.
After running a simple loop service for the first part of the phase, residents were then able to book BusBot on demand by either using a smartphone app (powered by app developer Via) or by calling Marian Grove reception.
The BusBot team invited community groups into Marian Grove Retirement Village to test out BusBot. This included running a schools program for neighbouring students to come and test out the future of transport. The program ran between June 24 and June 27.
Students asked extremely insightful questions about the technology and the vehicle and were excited about the possibilities the vehicle presents. Through this process, we were able to obtain some valuable information about the perceptions future generations have about driverless vehicles.
Several media outlets have published stories on BusBot lately.
Head to the news article section of the website here to view them all.