There's news about the world's two small PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) projects, which are both fairly robocar like, in that they involve self-steered rubber tired vehicles.

The Heathrow ULTra parking shuttle, which has 3 stops, uses pods which travel an ordinary pavement guideway with small curbs on the sides which the vehicle reads to guide itself. This system has been delayed many times, but reports it is finally getting close to opening. ULTra reports their system is now being used in a trial by the employees at LHR Terminal 5, though not the general public. Their newsletter also details how this demonstration system has spurred a fair bit of interest in a number of places, particularly India and Silicon Valley.

ULTra pods require dedicated track and don't have tools to avoid pedestrians. The initial system is quite small.

The news is worse for the PRT system of Masdar, near Abu Dhabi. Masdar was planned as an all-green, car-free city. Aside from a maglev and light rail, the plan was to use an unusual arabian architecture. The ground level would be used by the PRT cars and other city vehicles, but a second "main floor" level would be built above this with the pedestrian walkways and main entrances to all the buildings. Arab streets are designed to be narrow, and elevated streets for people are easier to make than those for trains. To take the PRT, one would go into the "basement" which was really at ground level. In these streets, cybercars from 2getthere are to run. These are also rubber tire vehicles, but they get their guidance by following magnetic markers embedded in the road. Many people like the magnet approach as it is easy to follow, reliable and fairly cheap to install, even in existing roads.

Unfortunately as reported in Arabian News and this press release the plan for a city full of this "undercroft" and PRT cars has been scaled back. In particular, further reports indicate the elevated pedestrian street model will only be built in a limited zone at and around the university. The PRT will have only a 2 passenger stops, 1.7km of road and only 8 vehicles for the public (plus freight and VIP vehicles and 3 freight stops.) Outside this area will be conventional ground-level streets with conventional transit. It's not been stated if private cars will also roam the regular streets, since the goal was a car-free city.

The article does make me wonder if they are thinking about robocars for those streets. The 2getthere cybercars do include some basic obstacle avoidance, though they are not ready to go out with the public. But at some point it will be possible, and the Masdar transportation plan might be realized even without the undercroft approach, or combining it with regular shared streets.

Robocars might also make sense for the Heathrow parking lot shuttle. Today the PRT is taking people to two stations in a large outdoor parking lot, but navigating a parking lot is a fairly easy problem for robocars -- the environment is roughly controlled, and while there are pedestrians and slow-moving cars going in and out of parking spaces, these are easy to reliably avoid with LIDAR and other sensors. A better parking shuttle might take you right to your car, and pick you up there too if it is able to see people waving, or they text their spot number to a special number.

Of course, even better would be if the car then took you not to the airport entrance but into the airport, right to security. And even better if it was able to pick you up right at your gate and drive you (secured) along the controlled roads of the airport, out the security gate and right to the parking lot, taxi stand and rental car facility.

This has been a busy week of robocar developments, sparked in part by Google's announcement. However, the PRT developments are just a coincidence.