As one of the leaders in Russian sharing, Whoosh not only manages the service but is also engaged in technological developments to increase the level of comfort and safety for all users. The Company was the first in the market to introduce forced speed reduction for scooters in crowded areas and is currently investing in technology to make scooters safe and predictable. The project, which is being conducted by NSU students, will allow users to choose a route with smoother surfaces including routes with fewer curbs, without stairs, and without entering public roads.
Yegor Bayandin, Whoosh CTO and graduate of NSU Department of Information Technologies, discussed the project,
We are a high-tech company and we offered Novosibirsk students an interesting and creative task for which you need to not only have technical knowledge, but also to get acquainted with the real sector to understand how people use scooters in everyday life. There are already intermediate results, and they are good. We see how every year graduates of technical specialties look for opportunities to start their careers. We hope that the work on Whoosh projects will bring future specialists closer to the industry, including our company, and will allow them to see the applied and social significance of the acquired knowledge and skills.
Whoosh's cooperation with NSU is not accidental, the Novosibirsk technical school is one of the strongest in Russia and Novosibirsk is the birthplace of the sharing service founders. Students and staff at the Laboratory of Applied Digital Technologies, part of the Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok, will work with the Whoosh IT development team, which is engaged in the creation and implementation of technological solutions for micro transport.
Sergey Ospichev, Researcher at the Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok and Candidate of Physical and Mechanical Sciences, described the project,
The project was interesting because there is no ready-made solution for the task and the future convenience of the Whoosh service depends on how my colleagues and I achieve our goal. There are quite a few interesting challenges since it will not be possible to directly use existing solutions for building routes: scooters cannot be used on public roads and routes for pedestrians may have stairs that are inaccessible to scooters. For the first stage of the project, we chose our native Akademgorodok where every path is familiar and any problem with the route is easy to check first hand. The next step we will start comparing routes with statistical data and build a mathematical model that will take into account all the route’s parameters.
