Golf Car Options Magazine Juy 2019 Golf Car Options Magazine July 2019 | Page 13

AUTONOMOUS GOLF CART
Engineered by Cedarville University Students
C
EDARVILLE, Ohio, April 17, 2019 /
PRNewswire/ -- Golfers often work on their
drive. But a group of Cedarville University
computer engineering students is taking that
focus to a whole new level.
Three Cedarville computer engineering stu-
dents — Nathan Jessurun (Charles Town, West
Virginia), Ryan Gordon (Beavercreek, Ohio)
and Michael Hayes (Redmond, Washington)
— are teaming up with Alex Cline (Cedarville,
Ohio), an electrical engineering student, to
design and build an autonomous golf cart.
We want our students to take part in the innova-
tive ventures going on in the engineering world
today,” said Danielle Fredette, Ph.D., assistant
professor of electrical engineering and faculty
advisor to the project. “Big projects like this are a
good fit for our students’ capabilities.”
A golf cart is a cost-effective vehicle to use to test
and develop autonomous driving technology.
The project will cost approximately $2,000 to
purchase a used golf cart and $1,500 for software
and hardware to make the cart driverless. Clint
Kohl, Ph.D., professor of computer engineering,
and Gerry Brown, Ph.D., associate professor of
electrical engineering, have helped students with
the design and development of this project.
There are three main problems the engineering
students are trying to solve: how to make the golf
cart go, stop and steer autonomously.
To resolve these challenges, the Cedarville team
added new electrical hardware elements to allow
the original car motor and its mechanical steering
and braking systems to interface with a control
computer. The computer gets data from a GPS
unit and a RADAR unit, allowing the car to self
localize, sense and navigate through its environ-
ment.
The GPS system on the roof guides the golf cart
through a preprogrammed set of GPS coordi-
nates. The sensors will signal the cart when it is
about to bump into something, so it steers or
brakes. These sensors allow the computer to re-
route in the case of an obstacle and keep the cart
moving to the next GPS coordinate. The dynamic
routing functionality will be more fully imple-
mented by next year’s team.
The external sensors on the cart function effec-
tively in fog or rain, according to Fredette, and
the brake can still be used manually by the pas-
sengers in the cart.
Located in southwest Ohio, Cedarville University
is an accredited, Christ-centered, Baptist institu-
tion with an enrollment of 4,193 undergraduate,
graduate and online students in more than 150
areas of study. For more information about the
University, visit www.cedarville.edu.
SOURCE Cedarville University
http://www.cedarville.edu
JULY 2019
13