Autonomous Campus Taxi

Discipline: CS

Advisor: Edward Amoruso

The Autonomous Campus Taxi (ACT) is a self-driving electric golf cart designed to provide safe, on-demand transportation across the University of Central Florida campus. UCF is one of the largest universities in the country by both student enrollment and campus size, often requiring students and faculty to walk long distances in crowded environments, which can be especially difficult for individuals with mobility challenges. ACT addresses this problem by providing an autonomous mobility system to navigate along golf cart-accessible paths. The system uses a combination of LiDAR, cameras, GPS, and ultrasonic sensors to perceive its environment and localize itself on campus. An NVIDIA Jetson computer fuses perception data into a real-time costmap that allows the vehicle to detect obstacles, classify drivable space, and safely plan motion through various areas on campus. A global route planner generates paths along golf cart-accessible campus pathways, while a local planner continuously evaluates candidate trajectories to safely follow the route while avoiding dynamic obstacles. The target trajectory is converted into throttle, braking, and steering values, and transmitted to an ESP32 microcontroller for motor control. Users can request rides and select destinations through a mobile application, which also provides real-time vehicle tracking.

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