From Detecting Health and Vehicle Safety to Slowing Speeds on Sidewalks to Forward Collision Intervention, Spin Insight Will Offer a Safer Experience for Both Riders and Pedestrians
By Maxime Veron, Vice President of Product
For half a century, automotive companies have invested in innovations like advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) which aim to automate and improve driving, ensuring the safety of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. Many people don’t realize ADAS played a role in automobile safety starting in the 1970’s with anti-lock braking systems (ABS). Today, ADAS features, including lane departure and collision detection, are more widely known and talked about because they are the building blocks for autonomous vehicle technology.
Spin is charting a similar path for the micromobility industry so that we can provide a safer experience for riders and a less disruptive service to non-riders. Although Spin is known for its outstanding track record when it comes to regulatory compliance, it isn’t always possible to control the behavior of our riders or influence their decision-making. These challenges are clear in a recent national consumer survey we conducted: 74 percent of consumers’ top concerns revolve around safety including the need to keep sidewalks clear for pedestrians, ensuring scooters are safely maintained and the difficulty of safely riding close to cars on the street.
Spin is committed to developing technologies onboard our own scooters to address these concerns. Through a combination of cutting edge sensors and vehicle intelligence, we can use these insights to implement no-go and slow zones to prevent scooters from traveling in high traffic areas, improve response time to detect and reposition improperly parked scooters, detect in real time sidewalk and bike lane riding, and share aggregated information to help local officials improve and enforce local regulations. We call this platform Spin Insight.
Spin Insight Level 1: Vehicle Health and Safety
We started on this path three years ago with Spin Insight Level 1, driven by the vision that e-scooters need to be acutely aware of where they are, and certain that they are safely functioning. Spin Insight Level 1 utilizes 30 different sensors in the scooter to evaluate the health of the vehicle at sub-second frequency. This serves as a critical component in maintaining our vehicles and allowing us to help minimize unsafe situations. Some of these features include monitoring battery level and temperature, controlling location and speed, and detecting when a scooter has been tipped over.
Spin Insight Level 2: Sidewalk Riding and Parking Validation
Still, some of the biggest complaints about dockless mobility systems stem from how riders interact with our product. Currently, there isn’t a solution with the ability to self-regulate to detect unsafe behaviors. Now, with the next generation of Spin Insight, we can provide a full-service solution to enforce local regulations, by giving our scooters the ability to “see” in real-time where they are going and how they are being used.
Spin Insight Level 2, powered by Drover AI’s computer vision and machine learning platform, equips Spin’s vehicles with a camera, additional sensors, and on-board computing power to detect sidewalk and bike lane riding, and validate parking. By leveraging powerful AI tools, Drover’s PathPilot technology is highly adaptive and easily scaled to new environments. Unlike other technologies, it doesn’t depend on the availability of GPS, ground truth information, or network-based validations to work. This allows the device to make decisions more quickly and precisely with an expected accuracy rate of better than 95 percent.
Spin Insight Level 2 will also enable Spin to share accurate insights with cities about the prevalence and location of sidewalk and bike lane riding, which can be used to identify potential congestion issues and road damage and highlight areas that may benefit from infrastructure improvements.
By early Spring, Spin will bring to market Spin Insight Level 2 in cities across the United States, United Kingdom, and other regions around the world. Spin is already training the technology in these regions. If Spin is awarded a permit in New York City, the City will receive the first large-scale deployment starting in the Spring. Learn more about our partnership with Drover AI here.
The Vision for Spin Insight
Spin is committed to building off of this technology and our Spin Insight platform to further enhance vehicle durability, lifespan, and safety. Future capabilities will further incorporate ADAS-like features focused on intervening to help prevent unsafe riding incidents.
Like ADAS for automobiles, Spin Insight will drastically improve our ability to provide a safer, more comfortable, and compliant experience that addresses pain points the industry has faced since its conception. As the industry continues to innovate, we hope our Spin Insights platform will give cities and consumers additional confidence in our service.
