Self-Driving Golf Carts May Actually Happen

Are you tired of driving yourself around on the golf course during your weekend warrior outings? Don’t worry, there’s now a way you can drink and get around the course without having to worry about steering your cart down the narrow cart path.

A company called Vlodyne LiDAR Inc., who has partnered with SMART, the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, to create a self-driving golf cart. The carts, currently only located in Singapore, were tested around a public garden where they carried 500 tourists around paths surrounded by vegetation and wildlife last September. The good news is that 98% of the passengers claimed they would ride in the carts again.

"For the experiment, researchers from MIT and Singaporean universities enlisted two modified Yamaha electric golf carts, each equipped with a webcam and Velodyne’s 16-channel real-time 3D VLP-16 LiDAR Puck, which replaced earlier 2D sensors. The carts transported passengers along the paths while autonomously navigating and watching for such obstacles as pedestrians and animals. The golf carts jockeyed for position along with everyone, and everything, else on the paths. Carts cruised at a top speed of about 15 miles per hour, relying on a “dynamic virtual bumper” – in effect, a cylinder surrounding the vehicle’s planned trajectory – rather than GPS. The cylinder’s width and length changed in response to the vehicle’s velocity. When an obstacle entered the cylinder, the vehicle’s onboard computer modified the cylinder to exclude it — altering the trajectory, reducing the velocity, or both."

So there you have it. You may be able to just sit back and ride along as your cart carries you around the golf course.