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21 W ith around 150 vehicles in operation around the world, EasyMile can claim leadership in the autonomous people-mover market. Founded by Gilbert Gagnaire, a successful entrepreneur, EasyMile’s flagship product is the EZ10 shuttle. It addresses otherwise unmet needs for tasks such as first- and last-mile transport between peoples’ homes and their nearest transport hubs, takes people around industrial estates and other facilities, and brings on-demand mobility to remote rural communities and the narrow streets of old towns. The EZ10 does not have to be fast – 20 kph is typical – and its easy pace supports the overarching safety case that is crucial to the future of autonomous ground vehicles on public roads, the company argues. Gagnaire started EasyMile in 2014, seeing huge potential in autonomous vehicle technology and wanting to deliver it using methodologies and processes whose quality was up to software industry standards. Looking for a challenging project and wanting to help people who live in places that, like the rural area he grew up in, are not well-served by public transport, he found that project in robotic smart mobility. He also obtained partial funding from the European Union under FP7, its Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development. EasyMile began with five engineers and some initial technology from Robosoft, which also spawned EasyMile EZ10 autonomous shuttle | Dossier Peter Donaldson looks at the development of this people-mover, which can be regarded as an enterprise computing system on wheels Enterprise zone Unmanned Systems Technology | April/May 2020