Project

Virtual Towing

Virtual Towing allows a city to rapidly collect and redistribute vehicles, by enabling a single driver to tow multiple vehicles without mechanically connecting them. Given the principles of one-way vehicle sharing in the CityCar concept, the need to stabilize the city's vehicle fleet metabolism is critical to properly balancing vehicle demand and location. Virtual towing builds upon the (digital) wheel robot architecture and combines a multitude of sensing technologies in order to maximize security and efficiency. The key issues of adoption and system autonomy are being explored in this project. A small-scale, radio-controlled vehicle has been built to test the control of the wheel robots and will serve as a testing platform for virtual towing.