The Wave of Autonomous Mobility: Architecture Facilitating Indoor Autonomous Navigation

When considering architectural and urban responses to autonomous mobility, it becomes evident that the future strategies will have to include a significant transformation to the built environment, particularly the ways it operates and interacts with inhabitants. Designers will not only need to rethink formal and functional arrangements but also, and perhaps primarily, consider the environment--buildings and cities--as active and equal actors with adaptive and autonomous behaviors similarly to those people or self-driving cars manifest. This paper discusses initial planning and design strategies for the integration of autonomous vehicles and other forms of autonomous mobility into the built environment. Specifically, it looks into necessary steps required to develop infrastructure to a level of autonomy that can facilitate a next generation of wayfinding and mobility. A growing research area into smaller personal mobility vehicles that would revolutionize elderly and disabled mobility brings to the light the major technical challenges present in current building infrastructure.