CCRI: Planning: ScooterLab: Development of a Programmable and Participatory e-Scooter Testbed to Enable CISE-focused Micromobility Research

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Single-rider micromobility vehicles, such as dock-less battery-powered e-scooters, are a fast-growing and popular short-distance transportation mechanism in our urban communities. This upcoming transportation paradigm not only provides new research opportunities in Computer and Information Science & Engineering (CISE) focused areas of large-scale data management, computer hardware/software systems design, cyber security and user-privacy, but also serves as an excellent instrument to collect contextual data that could enable research in a variety of other CISE and multi-disciplinary areas such as machine learning, high performance computing, urban planning, transportation engineering and public policy. However, currently a large-scale, easily customizable, and publicly-accessible research instrument comprising of micromobility vehicles to support these opportunities is unavailable, which hinders scientific advances in these areas. The goal of this project is to plan for the creation and eventual deployment of such a community infrastructure - a testbed referred to as ScooterLab. The ScooterLab testbed involves retrofitting off-the-shelf micromobility vehicles with customized sensors and controller computers and developing a management portal to support inter-disciplinary research collaborations. It will be available to community researchers for deployment of customized sensing experiments and trials of new algorithms/systems. Carefully curated datasets from these experiments and trials will be publicly-available and will enable new, ground-breaking research breakthroughs in CISE and other multi-disciplinary domains.This CISE Community Research Infrastructure (CCRI) planning project will make the following key contributions: (1) reach out to CISE and other inter-disciplinary communities focusing on micromobility research in order to further understand the requirements of researchers within this space, (2) implement proof-of-concept vehicles for the planned testbed and continuously improve the design of these preliminary prototypes based on community feedback, and (3) organize focused workshops and tutorials to update the community about these preliminary vehicle designs, testbed deployment plans and related research goals. This planning project is a necessary step towards implementation of the ScooterLab community testbed, which can prevent time-consuming and expensive duplication of research testbeds that are not shared with others. The outreach activities of this project and the planned ScooterLab testbed will provide opportunities for attracting and sustaining faculty and students working on intelligent micromobility solutions and transportation systems, and will bring together researchers from computer science, electrical engineering, urban planning, and public policy for inter-disciplinary research in this emerging area. The testbed will also be a foundational instrument for University of Texas at San Antonio’s (UTSA) planned Urban Science Institute, which is part of the ten-year plan for the Downtown campus. As a minority-serving institution (56% Hispanic and 51% Female), UTSA as a home for this testbed 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.