A smartbus is a bus that drives itself inside the depot – without a driver. smartbus = ordinary bus + SmartDEPOT™. Inside the depot it parks, drives to its charging position, goes through the wash and lines up for the morning departure, at low speed. A Smartbus Coordinator in the operator’s organisation supervises the smartbuses through SmartDEPOT™ Mission Control. On the street, a driver drives it, as today.
Two meanings of “smart bus”
For years, “smart bus”, two words, has meant a connected bus: telematics, passenger information, Wi-Fi, ticketing. That bus still has a driver at the wheel in the depot. A smartbus, one word and lowercase, names a vehicle, the way e-bus names a vehicle: a city bus with an autonomous driving system for depot operations. The depot is where it works. The term comes from Autonomous Systems, the company that develops SmartDEPOT™.
What a smartbus does inside the depot
The driver hands over at the depot entrance and takes the bus at the exit. In between, the smartbus makes the movements suited to automation: parking and repositioning, the drive to its charging position, the drive through the wash, and lining up in departure order for the morning. It drives empty, at low speed, on a known layout. If anything is unclear, it stops. That is what makes a bus with no safety driver on board possible inside the depot.
The Smartbus Coordinator, a new role in the operator’s organisation, supervises the smartbuses through SmartDEPOT™ Mission Control. Today the closest roles are the managers of shunting drivers and the garage managers.
Why the depot comes first
In Bad Birnbach, Germany’s first automated bus on a public road carried an attendant from its first day. Under EU rules, the attendant was still on board when the service ended in 2024. A bus with a safety driver is not autonomous — it is simply a more expensive bus.
City traffic is unpredictable: pedestrians, cyclists, roadworks. Someone has to stay on board for what the system cannot handle. Public-road operation also needs redundant drive-by-wire, which full-size series city buses do not yet have. Such buses take years to develop, approve and bring into fleets. Meanwhile, most pilots lead to the next pilot.
The depot is the first place where a city bus can work without a safety driver: a known layout, low speed, no passengers on board, and a stop as the safe answer to anything unclear. An autonomous bus becomes real when the safety driver leaves. More on the reasoning: Evolution, NOT Revolution: the practical path to autonomous buses.
What a smartbus returns to the operator
Across assessed depots, manual depot movement takes 10 to over 35 minutes per vehicle per day, depending on depot layout, fleet size and shift organisation. At MZA Warsaw, the measured figure is about 35 minutes a day for each bus: parking, charging approach, washing and repositioning. Every depot move the smartbus makes returns driver time to line service, and the last manoeuvre of a long shift, parking in a tight bay late in the evening, is one of the moves it makes. An operator can run the same estimate with its own numbers in Depot Minutes, a free online tool for depot time estimates.
Smartbuses bring measurable benefits to everyday depot operations:
- Always in the right place at exactly the right time – full flexibility, smooth operations, optimal use of time and space.
- Works tirelessly, sees more, reacts faster – fewer low-speed collisions, greater peace of mind, improved safety.
- Drives itself between the depot entrance and the exit – extra driver time for line service.
More on safety: How safe are smartbuses?
Three choices behind the smartbus
Autonomous Systems chose not to do three things. It stayed off public roads for now. It left bus building to European manufacturers, who already make and service the city buses operators run every day: a smartbus is an ordinary bus with SmartDEPOT™ fitted in the factory. And it kept the sensors on the bus, because sensors fixed in the depot can lose sight of people between parked buses. There are two ways to automate depot movements, intelligence in the depot or intelligence on the bus; the smartbus is the second.
Where smartbuses stand today
SmartDEPOT™ is in development. The public pilot runs on a minibus inside the PKM Gliwice depot; SmartDEPOT™ is designed for integration with regular 12-metre city buses. Autonomous Systems has carried out depot assessments with operators in Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Switzerland. Operators start with the Smartbus Onboard Program: a site survey and data exercise in their own depot.
Questions operators ask
A self-driving bus is meant to carry passengers on public roads, and today it carries a safety driver or attendant as well. A smartbus drives itself inside the depot, empty, at low speed, with no safety driver on board and a Smartbus Coordinator supervising from SmartDEPOT™ Mission Control. On the street, a driver drives it.
Nobody. The bus drives empty inside the depot. The Smartbus Coordinator supervises it through SmartDEPOT™ Mission Control, and the bus stops whenever something is unclear.
A smartbus is an ordinary bus with SmartDEPOT™ fitted in the factory by the bus manufacturer. The operator keeps the manufacturers, models and service it already works with.
SmartDEPOT™ is the system that turns an ordinary city bus into a smartbus: the autonomous driving system on the bus, and SmartDEPOT™ Mission Control, the supervision software the operator’s Smartbus Coordinator works with. Autonomous Systems in Gliwice, Poland, develops it.
A connected bus: telematics, passenger information, Wi-Fi, ticketing. It still has a driver at the wheel in the depot. A smartbus, one word, drives itself inside the depot.
Operators who want their own number start with Depot Minutes and the Smartbus Onboard Program, a site survey and data exercise in their own depot.
Smartbuses in every depot.