At first, the company was attracted to the Japantown neighborhood, but that community recently fought to get e-scooters removed from its sidewalks. Residents there might have been apprehensive about another vehicle, even one that moves at considerably lower speeds than scooters, said Andrea Arjona, project manager with the city. Services instead began downtown and in the city’s Buena Vista neighborhood.
“We want to first demonstrate what happens in other areas of the city that are more amenable,” she said. “And Kiwibot has been adaptable. Every suggestion we made to them — it didn’t matter how crazy or difficult it was.”
Kiwibot and San Jose have joined in a first-of-its-kind collaboration to feed location information from the delivery bots into the city’s Mobility Data Specification, a tool cities use to collect data from passenger-carrying mobility modes, such as e-scooters, rental bikes and ride-hailing services.
From a city perspective, it’s an important development that could be replicated elsewhere.
“After scooters, one thing we’re trying to do is not get caught by surprise again by a new vehicle moving in,” Arjona said. With the mobility data tool, “there’s no nomenclature for robots, but we’re adapting one. So we will have an update we can expand to new modes. That’s pretty significant.”
The collaboration presents potential benefits for citizens and robots alike. If an intersection is daunting for robots to cross, it is likely troublesome for pedestrians. If a crumbling sidewalk is difficult to traverse for bots, it likely is challenging for a wheelchair. Now such insights can be shared.
“We know which intersections are more dangerous, where drivers have more risky behavior,” Chavez said. “This is very exciting for us, and it’s very exciting for policymakers. It’s allowing us to have better conversations with other cities.”
