Neal Rubin: Scooter-safety inventors have the patent on creativity — and youth

Among the things the kids learned while they were tweaking their invention is that soft objects like people are less detectable to an ultrasonic sensor than hard objects like brick walls.

When you're an inventor, that's a variable. When you're a pedestrian and some guy zipping toward you on an electric scooter is checking his phone, that's something you might be very glad the kids from Bloomfield Hills figured out.

The 10 kids were fourth- through sixth-graders nearly four years ago when they won a statewide competition called FIRST LEGO League. Last week, as teenagers, they reaped a delayed reward: a reception, complete with cake and chicken wings and laudatory speeches from highly impressed adults, celebrating the patent for the safety system they designed.

That's one reward, anyway. Another, though it's hardly guaranteed, might be piles of money. And it is not lost on them that earning a patent for work they did before their teens will look robust on a college application.

"When I was their age," said James Wilson, "I don't know what I was doing, but it wasn't writing patent applications."

He grew up to be the assistant regional director of the Elijah J. McCoy Regional U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Detroit, so he's done OK. He's the one who took a meeting with some of the kids way back when to explain the patent process, and having provided them with valuable advice, he added some more for the parents and other well-wishers in a large meeting space at the USPTO.

"When there's an opportunity and time to celebrate these young people," he said, "let's make sure we don't skimp."

A round of applause, then, for the students who sat in two curved rows of folding chairs at the front of the room, mostly managing not to fidget.

In alphabetical order, they are: Elias Cengeri, Lucas Chin, Honor Hutchison, Katherine Konoya, Julia Mahoney, Keira Mahoney, Mihir Shah, Avani Nandalur, Evan Welch and Julia Xiao.

As for their innovation, the abstract on the patent includes phrasing like "the controller compares the speed of the micromobility vehicle with a predetermined speed threshold" and "the controller does not activate the warning device in the bypass mode."

Bottom line, y'know those motorized skateboards with handlebars that started careening through population centers in the 2010s?

This could make them less likely to run into things.

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An idea worth protecting

The U.S. granted 382,559 patents in the last fiscal year. It's undetermined how many went to packs of kids who are now in the eighth through 10th grades, but it's rare enough that the USPTO sent a communications officer from the main office in Washington, D.C., Rep. Haley Stevens sent a stand-in, Sen. Gary Peters sent good wishes via video and USPTO director Kathi Vidal checked in the same way.

"Every problem is worth solving," Vidal said, "and every solution is worth protecting."

As of April 11, patent No. US 11,623,707 B2 guards the ingenuity of the team that called itself the Great Engineering Kids of Tomorrow, or GEKOT, which was both optimistic and lent itself to the use of a cool lizard in its logo.

The idea was spawned in basements and powered by potato chips and juice boxes. A field trip helped, said engineer Dan Champoux, who, along with computer scientist and GEKOT parent Autumn Mahoney, is one of two advisers also credited on the patent.

Since the focus of the competition in 2019 included cities, they took the team to downtown Detroit, where the kids noticed that the flotillas of electric scooters were both inviting and out of control.

The potential antidote they devised uses lidar, short for light detection and radar and an improvement on the original ultrasonic sensor, to detect obstacles. Assorted other technology interprets the signal and activates a warning beacon on the handlebars.

A scooter donated by Razor, which became an enthusiastic backer of the project, was on display at the celebration, with the deck removed to show the wiring and control board. The innards would need to be streamlined for production, but the concept is what matters.

That, said eighth grader Elias Cengeri, and the mission: "We really wanted to improve life in the city."

And, said sophomore Julia Mahoney, the original building materials: "I love Legos."

Four years represents more than a quarter of the inventors' lives, and specifics about the creative process can be hard to conjure. But everyone had a talent and made an impact, Julia said, be it in coding, designing, translating ideas into layman-friendly English or any number of other things.

The kids have all changed, and found bands of friends as they've grown and in some cases moved. But they clustered comfortably the other night and laughed often, no matter what interests have remained or receded.

Julia, for one, has not joined the robotics team at Bloomfield Hills High. As time marches on, so does the Black Hawks band; make sure to watch the drumline, and listen for the cymbals.

From a magazine to market

The GEKOT's growing fan base has come to include the editor of North Carolina-based Inventors Digest, who — small world — spent his freshman year at Bloomfield Hills' now demolished Lahser High School.

Reid Creager said he'll feature the team in the September issue in a recurring section about young inventors called Wunderkinds.

"One could argue there is already so much alarm about these scooters — including the fact they are routinely and randomly abandoned all over town — that an alarm system is redundant," he said. "But the students’ idea is so practical and commonsense that it never could have come from an adult. It’s perfect."

Champoux, the co-adviser, thought so highly of both the concept and the name that he has formed a company to push the technology.

GEKOT Inc. has received a $90,000 pilot grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corp., he said, and has put scooters in the eager hands of a senior design class at Oakland University.

As Autumn Mahoney noted, "There are a million ways this might not turn into something." But Champoux hopes he has found one that will work — sell companies on a less expensive feature that will help detect falls, reckless driving and forays into prohibited locations, then accelerate to the patented GEKOT safety system.

Golf carts might be another market, he said. Likewise, forklifts. Any income stream would be nice, but so would validation, proving that an idea powered by a bunch of kids could come to market and prevent accidents.

They were surprisingly subdued last week, but when the first GEKOT-equipped scooter rolls off the line, cover your ears:

The youths will be heard.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com, or on Twitter at @nealrubin_dn.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Young inventors patent a way to make e-scooters safer