Uber has got a long-term plan to get rid of its drivers and replace them with all with self-driving cars. In fact, it is already testing autonomous vehicles and says that if Elon Musk can make enough in 2020 it will buy them all.

But they might have been beaten to it, as a system that allows passengers to order themselves a self-driving vehicle has already been created.

A booking system that allows visitors to organise pickups and drop-offs at 10 different locations has been made and tested by researchers at MIT.

The technology allows the vehicles to be automatically rerouted and deploy the correct number of vehicles at the right time to fill all the requests. However, the catch is that it’s using autonomous golf carts, rather than cars.

“We would like to use robot cars to make transportation available to everyone,” said Daniela Rus from MIT.

“The idea is, if you need a ride, you make a booking, maybe using your smartphone or maybe on the Internet, and the car just comes.”

The golf carts, which use off-the-shelf sensors, aren’t the first small vehicles to be converted to drive autonomously.

In the UK small driverless pods are in the process of being developed to be tested in public areas. The pods, called LUTZ Pathfinder (and animated below), will be used on public footpaths to allow passengers to get across short distances.

The slower speeds of these type of vehicles mean that it is easier for them to create a picture of what else is happening around them. However, the golf carts, while operating on public pathways, had a problem when they encountered a lizard and didn’t know what to do.

Rus said that while these types of small autonomous vehicles aren’t ideal to be used on roads or for long journeys – the golf carts have a top speed of 15mph – they have potential to help some specific groups get about.

“If you think about who needs rides, it’s fast enough for the elderly population who no longer have a driver’s license and live in special areas where maybe their friend lives a mile away, and that’s too far to walk,” she said.

“If they want to go to the doctor or shopping, they can use the self-driving golf carts because that’s within some comfortable distance.”

For the researchers, which included scientists from the National Research Foundation of Singapore as well as MIT, the key to creating self-driving golf carts was keeping the vehicles as simple as possible.

Rus described a “minimalist” approach to the vehicles.

She claims a “suite of strategically placed sensors and augment that with reliable algorithms” are better than a large number of sensors that can confuse each other.