Emergency braking system for autonomous golf cart: Final report

Abstract

The overall purpose of Oklahoma State University's Golf Cart project is to instrument and automate a fleet of autonomous Golf Cart systems for on-demand mobility on OSU campus, while providing engineering students with a hands-on application of the concepts learned in their curricula. As of August 2015, the golf cart had a very inadequate braking system. With the current system, it can take up to 8 seconds for the cart to come to a complete start. The final cart should have human-or-better braking. Furthermore, the golf cart does not know when to hit the brakes in an emergency, for example if a pedestrian, bike or other vehicle cuts in front of the cart. This Fall 2015 Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering 4344 Capstone Design team has produced to following deliverables in order to solve this problem: a system that is the prime controller of accelerator and brakes, the software will receive acceleration and brake requests from Stabilis (the navigation system already developed for the golf cart); This system is be able to detect emergency brake conditions, an emergency braking condition is whenever braking will either avoid or mitigate the impact of a collision, under the assumption that external objects and/or people maintain their current velocity; The system is able to apply the brakes and bring the golf cart to a complete stop in human-or-better time. CAD Models for Analysis - the team has modeled the mechanics of the braking system in Solidworks and performed structural analysis on it. The documentation of each of deliverable is contained in the present report.