パーソナルモビリティロボットの公道実証実験

― 構造改革特区から全国展開へ ―

抄録

The author defines a Personal Mobility Robot (PMR) as a personal mobility device faster than walking but not so fast as an automobile, requiring less resources and energy than an automobile, applying robotic technologies to improve safety, compactness, convenience, and so on. The author and his colleagues acquired exceptional measures of road traffic law and technical standard of motor vehicles in order to enable practical experiments of PMRs those do not conform to specific articles of technical standard. A considerable amount of practical experiments of several types of PMR were carried out on the sidewalks of Tsukuba for several years. The following facts were found; PMRs are effective mobility means in the real world; most pedestrians accept PMRs to pass sidewalks; PMRs can be operated safely among pedestrians and bicycles on sidewalks. New types of PMR are being developed to be committed to the practical experiments and the number of participants in the experiments are increasing.