Article

Fresh and United Rentals Bring Autonomous Vehicles to NIWeek

June 4, 2019 ...

At NIWeek 2019 in Austin, TX, Fresh Consulting debuted our partnership with equipment rental company United Rentals to showcase the autonomous vehicles Fresh and United Rentals have been building together.

Engineer Peter Adelhardt by sign

Fresh is a National Instruments Alliance Partner with the largest team of LabVIEW developers in the Pacific Northwest, and we’re using LabVIEW in our projects daily. We’ve been working closely with United Rentals to build autonomous vehicles, including the Club Car, Rover, and Track Vehicle, and brought all three products to NIWeek.

Club Car

The Club Car vehicle is designed to transport people and materials on a construction site. It utilizes sensors, including 2D and 3D LiDAR and RTK GPS connected to a CompactRIO control system running LabVIEW FPGA and LabVIEW Real-Time code with tablet-based path-planning software.

Autonomous vehicle Club Cart

Club Car back

NIWeek attendees could scan QR codes with an AR app we developed to bring up information about the vehicle sensors.

NIWeek AR app screenshot

Track Vehicle

Fresh outfitted a standard compact track loader with the same sensor and control package as the Club Car, to make it capable of operating autonomously. We implemented algorithms in LabVIEW using sensor data to detect obstacles and developed a tablet-based application to plot the vehicle’s courses.

Rover

Designed to be used indoors where GPS may not be available, Rover is equipped with a camera that uses QR code-like ceiling posters to find location and orientation.

The NIWeek Team

From developing the AR informational app to answering attendees’ questions, a combined team of over 20 Fresh team members supported our appearance at NIWeek. We’d like to give a big thanks to United Rentals for their partnership not only during NIWeek, but as we continue developing autonomous vehicle technology together.

We hope to see you at NIWeek 2020! Until then, are you considering how autonomous robotics would add value and increase efficiency at your company? Learn more about autonomous robotics and let us know how we can help you.