Autonomous Vehicles: Building a Test-bed Prototype at a Controlled Environment

Rapid improvements in technology are making autonomous vehicles feasible. Researchers and industry are looking for different methods to implement the concept of smart cities. Autonomous Vehicles provide a unifying framework for several research topics (e.g., navigation, localization and Global Positioning System (GPS) positioning, security, and privacy). Despite significant progress, we believe that fully autonomous vehicles will be deployed initially in constrained environments (e.g., closed-loop areas, gated retirement communities).In this paper, we describe the development of a prototype autonomous golf-cart that can be used as a test-bed for a range of research projects. We explain the details of the conversion from a traditional golf-cart to an autonomously driven one. Our target application is a system of autonomously driven golf-carts for use within a retirement community. We show our testing results, and how Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be used to extend the WiFi coverage for log reporting and to request the golf-cart. Finally, we discuss the challenges and highlight improvements that can be performed on the system.