Drive-By-Wire Conversion of an Electric Golf-Cart for Self-Driving Vehicles Research

In this paper, we present the drive-by-conversion of an electric golf-cart and summarize how it is used for self-driving vehicles research. This work is basically a major progress compared to our earlier work presented in [1]. The drive-by-wire system has a touch-screen control panel driven by a Raspberry Pi device, but all of the timing critical tasks are executed on microcontrollers. We used industry standard DIN rails and panels to organize the control hardware and the electrical wiring. The developed system have three different modes of operation (1) Fully manual, (2) X-box wireless controller based remote controlled operation, and (3) Drive-by-wire mode where all control commands are expected to be sent from an "external" computer over a USB/serial connection. The drive-by-wire system is designed to be used to together with an x86-64 or ARM processor based device equipped by GPU hardware. This on-board computer, is called the vehicle computer, or the "external" computer, and it is mainly for more heavy-weight AI algorithms and decision making. Once steering decisions are completed, they are all sent to the Pi and/or microcontrollers to operate the actuators. The electric golf-cart also has a GPS/GNSS sensor, and solar panels with an MPPT device which are used to charge the batteries while the vehicle is being used or driven. A short demo video of the developed system is available at [2].