Imagine this futuristic airport scenario: Your flight lands. You disembark, and because you have a physical disability, you open an app on your smartphone and press a button to call for a wheelchair. What soon meets you at the gate is not just any wheelchair—it’s a self-driving wheelchair. It gently whisks you to the baggage claim and out to meet your ground transportation.

Such a scenario will play out this year at Japan’s Haneda Airport, where five autonomous wheelchairs designed by personal mobility company Whill and electronics giant Panasonic will go through technical trials. In addition to hailing a wheelchair with the app, the user can also choose his destination within the airport.

The autonomous wheelchair—the Whill Model M—uses two lidar sensors to give the chair’s onboard computer a detailed picture of its surroundings. The computer can then continuously locate the chair on a digital map of the airport terminal. It chooses the best route based on the chair’s current position, Panasonic spokesperson Mio Yamanaka told IEEE Spectrum. The Model M automatically returns to its base when not in use.

Last year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the Whill Model M as a medical device. As a result, doctors can prescribe the chair for patients, and insurers could pick up at least a portion of the estimated $14,000 cost, according to tech website TechCrunch.

Students use education apps in Tanzania XPrize Foundation

Tablets in Tanzania

An estimated 250 million children around the world cannot read, write, or do basic math, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. To tackle this problem, the XPrize Foundation in 2014 launched a $15 million Global Learning XPrize competition. The competition’s goal is to encourage the development of free, open-source learning software that could enable children to “teach themselves” (with the help of tablet computers) basic reading, writing, and arithmetic within a 15-month period.

In September the XPrize Foundation announced five finalists: CCI (from the United States), Chimple (India), Kitkit School (U.S.), Onebillion (U.K., Malawi, and Tanzania), and RoboTutor (U.S.). Although each team’s software program is a bit different, all involve educational tests, games, or stories children can interact with on tablets. In the process the kids should learn to read, spell, and add or subtract. (It remains to be seen whether the tablets can outperform human teachers.)

Each finalist gets a $1 million milestone prize to fund continued development work. Meanwhile, approximately 4,000 children from 150 villages in Tanzania will field-test the programs using donated tablets. The team whose software generates the greatest gains in reading, writing, and arithmetic proficiency will receive a grand prize of $10 million, to be announced in 2019. —M.C.

Mapbox Handout

Fast map

Have you ever been in an unfamiliar city and wanted to find a place to eat within a five-minute walk? Soon there may be an app for that.

Map app developer Mapbox has built a prototype of a time-based map that places you in the center: Using concentric circles, the map shows how long it will take you to get somewhere by foot, bicycle, or car.

Mapbox’s Peter Liu envisions it as a front end for traditional apps such as Google Maps to help users choose where they want to go.

“We’re using distance as an imprecise and poor proxy for travel time,” Liu told the website Co.Design. “Why not cut to the chase and visualize travel time?” —M.C.