Cougar Autonomous Robotic Transport (CART)

Thanks for reading our blog! If you haven’t seen it already, you may want to check out our first blog post . Introduction and Problem As discussed in our previous post, our challenge lies in designing an effective ‘short-distance’ transportation system for visitors and students/faculty unable to walk around the University of Houston campus. A potential solution lies in using golf carts to navigate between points of interest on campus. Golf carts are ideal because they are small enough to drive on sidewalks and paths that are inaccessible to regular vehicles. Further, by making these golf carts autonomous, there is no need for a dedicated driver, so the University can reduce the operating costs of this transportation system. Eliminating the human driver reduces cost while also increasing the safety of cart, as more than 90% of crashes are caused by human error ( NSC 2019 ). Unfortunately, there are no commercially available autonomous golf carts. Despite multiple attempts (e.g. Aur...

Problem and Introduction Here’s the problem: the University of Houston is getting bigger, which means it needs an effective way to transport people (visitors, people unable to walk, etc.) around campus. The challenge lies in designing an effective ‘short-distance’ transportation system for visitors and students/faculty unable to walk around campus. A potential solution lies in using golf carts to navigate between points of interest on campus. Golf carts are ideal because they are small enough to drive on sidewalks and paths that are inaccessible to regular vehicles. Further, by making these golf carts autonomous, there is no need for a dedicated driver, so the University can reduce the operating costs of this transportation system. Eliminating the human driver reduces cost while increasing the safety of cart, as more than 90% of crashes are caused by human error ( NSC 2019 ). Unfortunately, there are no commercially available autonomous golf carts. Despite multiple attempts (e.g....