Vehicle Level Software Design of the Florida Polytechnic Autonomous Golf-Cart

In this paper, we summarize some of the design and implementation related aspects of the Florida Polytechnic Autonomous Golf-Cart, and present details of the low-level microcontroller based subsystem, two-way non-blocking communication details, and the lightweight software subsystem based on the co-operative multitasking approach. Autonomous vehicles research is becoming a larger field each day. As technology progresses, we want to develop more efficient and smarter vehicles which can transport us with little to no input from the motorist, and electric golf carts are valuable assets towards this goal. In the scientific literature, there are several published results and proposed architectures for autonomous golf carts, and we will review some of major ones, describing pros and cons of each design approach, and how they relate to our design and implementation. However, our main focus will be the vehicle level software design.