Micromobility solutions that are gaining more and more followers for short-distance urban trips have conquered previously unknown territory. If up to now, when referring to personal mobility vehicles, we were referring to bicycles, electric scooters and other similar gadgets, such as electric unicycles or hoverboards, in recent months a new actor has joined the urban micromobility family.
We are talking about the Moonwalkers shoes, developed by the startup Shift Robotics in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University (United States). These are electric shoes that work like airport gangways, allowing effortless walking at a constant speed. Xunjie Zhang, founder and CEO of the company, defines these shoes as “the fastest in the world”, since with them you can travel 11.27 kilometers per hour without effort, that is, something more than double the average speed of a person, which is 4.83 kilometers per hour.
The birth of this new micromobility solution came almost by chance. As Shift Robotics explains on its website, Zhang devised these walking platforms after suffering a traffic accident with an electric scooter when he was hit by a car on his way to work.
Xunjie Zhang wondered why he had never walked to the workplace when it is a much safer way to get around. That’s when she teamed up with a group of car engineers, robotics specialists and sneaker designers to create a shoe-shaped electric vehicle.
Five years later, Moonwalkers shoes are already a reality. Although, at first glance, it may seem that they are skates more than shoes, their inventor defends that they really are sneakers. In fact, the user should not make the characteristic movement of the skates to move, but only walk as he normally does. In this way, he manages to move at the same pace that he does, for example, on the conveyor belts that are in the corridors of airports.
“It is not necessary to swing to walk with the Moonwalkers. You just have to go faster to speed up and slower to slow down,” Zhang explains.
Technically, it is debatable to call this contraption shoes. Actually, they are small platforms that are placed under the shoes and are attached to them through a system of magnetic buckles and harnesses that prevent them from disengaging from the shoe. These platforms have small wheels attached to a base, which is what allows the user to move at twice the normal speed.
The platforms feature a 300-watt electric motor attached to the wheels that provides a top speed of 7 miles per hour. Its autonomy is up to 10 kilometers. The powertrain of the shoes is equipped with artificial intelligence to adapt to different ways of walking so that the user can move “in a way that seems natural,” the company explains. Likewise, it is very intuitive to access the button to stop the motor in certain situations such as when you have to climb some stairs.
For now, one of the big problems that users of these platforms have to deal with is that they do not allow spins themselves. People who equip Moonwalkers have to stop before turning and face the right direction again to continue moving in the right direction.
The other major obstacle to putting on this gadget that is only marketed in the United States is its high price: $1,399, around 1,300 euros. This amount is almost double what any upper-middle-range electric scooter costs.
