Dutch company 2getthere, a specialist in Automated People Mover Systems, is firmly in the spotlight by a slew of high-profile Middle Eastern and Asian projects. Founder and CEO Carel van Helsdingen reflects on his company’s challenging start-up period, in which it had to virtually singlehandedly develop both the technology and its own market.
Dutch company 2getthere, a specialist in Automated People Mover Systems, is firmly in the spotlight by a slew of high-profile Middle Eastern and Asian projects. Founder and CEO Carel van Helsdingen reflects on his company’s challenging start-up period, in which it had to virtually singlehandedly develop both the technology and its own market.
Mention the term ‘automated transport’, and 99 out of 100 people will think you’re referring to driverless vehicles. But the fact is that actual, fully driverless vehicles are still a pipe dream and will remain so for some time yet – the optimism of some automobile manufacturers notwithstanding. This is because public roads are uncontrolled environments, in which the operating software must be able to safely anticipate events that are extremely rare but of which there are, at the same time, an infinite number. This has turned out to be trickier from a technical point of view than initially anticipated.
Driverless vehicles in a controlled environment (say, an industrial estate, business campus or airport) are a different story. In these spaces, self-driving vehicles have access to separate lanes, without the risk of being ‘caught off guard’ by errant pedestrians, swaying cyclists or taxicabs cutting them off.
This explains why it is in these types of settings that the first real, operational applications of automated transport – generally referred to as Automated People Mover Systems (APMS) – have become a reality.