Foresight Augmented Reality FAR was recently invited to participate in the Mcity Accessibility Workshop: Where the Vehicle Meets the Curb!
If you haven’t seen the Mcity videos online, you’re missing out on incredible advancements in AVs. Here’s a little bit to quench curiosity.
Mcity Test Facility Video Tour
Other participants included Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, US Access Board, Intelligent Transportation Society of America, Autonomous Vehicle Alliance, the University of Michigan, and a few other notable organizations.
The panel Tanner Gers, Director of Business Development for FAR, participated in focused on the first and last mile of the journey of a person with a disability using autonomous vehicles. Specifically, how does a person with a disability safely navigate to and from the autonomous vehicle.
While this task is mostly uneventful for people without disabilities, finding a car that is 50 meters away, without human intervention, is more than challenging. It’s nearly impossible.
How do we ensure someone with blindness or Alzheimer’s can even find the AV? Get into the right AV? What about communicate with the AV?
How do we ensure safety getting to, while onboard, and exiting the vehicle? How do we alert emergency services in the event of an accident? And how do we do that without human intervention?
How do we ensure accessibility and equitable inclusion for people of all abilities including those who are blind, deaf blind, don’t have functional use of their hands, or are developmentally impaired?
It’s equitable inclusion transportation problems like this, and many more, that FAR is passionately working to solve.
It’s the combination of this passion-driven purpose, users with disabilities baked into the development process, and incredibly innovative, never-been-done before IP coming together to create the transportations solutions of the future.
This is why we were selected as semi-finalists in the Department of Transportation’s Inclusive Design Challenge. This is how we will make inclusive transportation for everyone a reality.