In an effort to “advance cutting-edge research for years to come,” a team of researchers at Florida Polytechnic University (Florida Poly) is turning a disused golf cart into a solar-powered autonomous vehicle.

Funded by the University’s Advanced Mobility Institute, the project will support a $350,000 National Science Foundation award to develop a large-scale Hardware-in-the-Loop simulation facility for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV).

“We are designing this in such a way that students can do research with it – it’s not just for demonstration,” explains Dr. Arman Sargolzaei, director of the Advanced Mobility Institute, which focuses on the development and testing of autonomous vehicle technology.

“We are making the code and applications available, so undergraduate and graduate students in the future can do research and implement different algorithms for different fields for autonomy, control systems, cybersecurity, power systems, and energy systems.”

The project brings together renewable energy and CAV technology, which Florida Poly describe as “two critical and emerging fields.” The renewable energy portion of the project is being led by Dr. Mohammad Reza Khalghani.

Student researches repaired the broken golf cart during the spring semester. They began working on the golf cart’s high-tech transformation at the start of the summer term. They first started by developing a simulated golf cart for demonstrations, before recreating the simulations on the actual vehicle.

“It’s becoming more and more important to have smart ways of transporting people. Smart technology has become a lot bigger recently and it’s only going to increase,” says electrical engineering junior Eduarda Farias, who is a research assistant on the project.

“Autonomous vehicles are one of the next technologies we are going to integrate into our lives.”

Recently, the team achieved a successful milestone by converting the cart into a drive-by-wire vehicle that can be controlled through a website. According to James Holland, a research assistant on the project that earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Florida Poly in May, the cart is now similar to a big remote-controlled vehicle.

“Our demo went really well with the golf cart rolling forward at 50 percent acceleration and then backward before coming to a stop on its own. It followed the commands to a T,” Holland says. “It was awesome to see the payoff of all our work and see it run.”

The team plans to continue working on the vehicle over the coming semester both in person and remotely.

“The next steps will include working on path following and object avoidance algorithms and programming – really developing the autonomous part of the golf cart,” Farias says.

Photo below: Bruce Hicks, a junior majoring in electrical engineering, demonstrates the progress he and a team of Florida Polytechnic University research assistants have made on transforming an old golf cart into an autonomous, solar-powered vehicle. Photo courtesy of ​Florida Polytechnic University