Autonomous Vehicles Moving COVID-19 Tests In Florida

There’s a lot to rethink about how we move about the world – or don’t, right now – as the COVID-19 crisis continues around the world. In the automotive sphere, that means reconsidering the benefits and risks of shared mobility, the kind with vehicles that are used by a large number of people throughout the day. We’ve certainly become more aware of the risks of transmission through viruses that remain on surfaces as we learn more about the coronavirus situation, but some people are saying that shared vehicles are no more dangerous than shopping carts during this time if you’re careful. As I’m not a doctor, I will not weigh in on this particular aspect.

What I can report is that autonomous shuttles are providing some obvious benefits for health care workers right now by reducing some incidents of face-to-face contact. While a roomy autonomous shuttle could actually increase such contact under normal circumstances, they can also be used to keep people further apart from each others, as is currently recommended in our new social distancing reality.

That’s what’s happening at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, thanks to a partnership between the clinic, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, Beep and NAVYA. Using the NAVYA autonomous shuttles, workers have been loading coronavirus test materials into the vehicles and then sending them on their way, removing a human driver from the potential transmission chain. Four of these autonomous vehicles (AVs) are being used to run the test specimens from a drive-through test site to a processing laboratory on the Mayo Clinic campus. The hospital says that another benefit to using the AVs is that it allows stretched thin health care staff to focus on things other than driving back and forth.

This sort of technology isn’t just being used in the U.S. As you can see in the video below, a lot of autonomous robots have been put to work during the COVID-19 outbreak in China, acting as security rovers or health monitoring stations, or simply cleaning floors or roads or delivering goods to people forced to stay in their homes. The company RoboSense put this video together to showcase different AVs that use its LiDAR technology in their sensor arrays.

Why it uses the Wonder Woman theme song is something we can debate from our separate quarantined homes. Also, did you know that the song is called “Is She With You?” I did not.