Drones, driverless cars for Sentosa Island?

SINGAPORE — Sentosa Island is set to become a testbed for smart solutions for transport, crowd management and other issues faced by the island, under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed with the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA).

Under the MOU, Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC) will work with the IDA to identify problems, in areas such as the island’s transportation, crowd and traffic management, safety and security services, and waste management.

Speaking at the signing yesterday at the Smart Nation Innovations event, SDC chief financial officer Mr Chin Sak Hin said that it is looking to deploy solutions that can enable the company to do more with the same manpower.

This can include autonomous vehicles, which can both ferry visitors around the island and mow the grass, as the island covers a large area. Drones could be deployed to see which areas need cleaning up, for example, instead of having crews moving around to search.

“Sentosa being an eco-system on its own, as well as a place where we have hotels, we have public spaces, I think it’s important for us to be part of this whole Smart Nation test-bedding, to test the ideas on the island, because we have an eco-system on our own. We can hopefully share the ideas with the rest of the industry in Singapore,” he said.

During peak periods on weekends and public holidays, crowds on the island can hit more than 100,000 a day, said SDC.

SDC will be looking to start trials with technology companies in the next six to 12 months, said Mr Chin.