Project Summary

Beryl technologists aim to use TRIG funding to enhance their smart IoT unit, featured on 15,000+ micro mobility vehicles in the UK. This will enable them to extract new sensor data to accurately identify unreported accidents and near misses during users’ journeys (8-10 million annually). The findings will inform data-driven infrastructure improvements, ultimately improving cycle safety and perception.

Project Achievements

1. Undertake firmware engineering in order to analyse sensor data that is available to us through our smart unit technology. 2. Develop the firmware data to extract and communicate that information back to our cloud-based systems. 3. Undertake software/database engineering to store this data in a coherent way so that it can be analysed by ourselves and/or third parties (AI technologies) 4. Train models to identify these incidents in the context of all the other data (making it more likely to be accurate). 5. Data dashboards, summarising and accident and near miss data drafted and shared with transport and local authority partners. Dashboards finalised after discussions with transport and local authority partners

Conclusions

The project has allowed Beryl to kickstart a core business objective of improving safety for our riders and influencing infrastructure decisions for all road users. Dedicating time and resources to this project has allowed us to broaden our knowledge of current data capture and learn the complexities of training AI models. Successful in developing concepts and making milestones that have taken similar projects years to reach, with a dedicated roadmap to bringing the concept to local authorities within the next 12 months.

Next Steps

• Designing architecture for incident detection and follow-up flow. • Implementing rider incident follow-up flow • Active rider incident form to rider journeys which involved an incident • Roll out sample fleet on 50 bikes to train AI models • Over-the-air updates to all vehicles We have received strong interest and began collaborating with our council partners (Norwich, BCP and Brighton) on current methods of reporting accidents to identify the gaps our project will look to fulfil. Becoming a part of council policy looking forward and enabling them to unlock further funding for projects. Moving forward this improvement to our smart IoT unit will be available to all future partners and will enable more cities in the U.K. and worldwide to benefit from this data. This improvement will enhance our capability to remain a market leader in micro mobility services in the U.K. and will also act as a differentiator as we look to expand our service to Europe and the US over the next 1-2 years. The tendering process that we have to undertake to win new contracts (new cities / regions) has a heavy emphasis on safety and these improvements will enable us to compete favourably and win more contracts in the U.K. and EU / US.