United Rentals
Autonomous Club Car

clubcar-hero

A safe, automated solution for transporting people and moving materials on construction sites

Background

United Rentals––the world’s largest equipment rental company, with a fleet of over 600,000 units––set out to start automating their vehicles to provide additional value for customers. Our engineers started with several vehicles, one of which was a Club Car. It would provide an efficient, resource-saving approach to transporting people and moving materials around construction sites.

Challenges

  1. Identifying the ideal sensor package for the job and creating a tablet-based application for control
  2. Creating a custom technology package to drive the vehicle, including SICK and Velodyne LiDAR, RTK GPS, and a CompactRIO control system running LabVIEW FPGA and LabVIEW Real-Time code
  3. Integrating the system with ROC, a Fresh-authored path-planning navigation app

Key Contributors

Likhi Ondov
Likhi Ondov
Avinash Singh
Avinash Singh
Richard Johnson
Richard Johnson
Nissa Van Meter
Nissa Van Meter
Gene Hancock
Gene Hancock
Taylor Kendall
Taylor Kendall
Cole Wilhelm
Cole Wilhelm
Tylor Echols
Tylor Echols
Jonathan Shimoda
Jonathan Shimoda
Jeff Dalton
Jeff Dalton
Sonika Latkar
Sonika Latkar
Grant Ritter
Grant Ritter
Michelle Tolfa
Michelle Tolfa
Stefan Petkov
Stefan Petkov
Greg Starr
Greg Starr
Ian McDermott
Ian McDermott
Laird Free
Laird Free

Reliable navigation and operation

The path planning software is a tablet-based application called Robot Operational Control (ROC). Using the same sensors and cRIO system allowed Fresh to leverage the existing code base and engineering expertise.

Each vehicle takes engineering ingenuity to figure out how to control the vehicle components. Each use case takes custom engineering to build the driving algorithm. But by leveraging our existing knowledge base and tools, we created an extensible, scalable solution that can be easily adapted for other similar vehicles.

Showcasing the technology with the power of XR

To illustrate the Club Car’s autonomous capabilities during its debut at NIWeek 2019, we created a 3D model that guides viewers through some of the vehicle’s autonomous features and how they work. Using various visual anchors on the vehicle and a tablet, users can view information about the different sensors and technology under the hood, with text and video featuring Fresh engineers who provide more information about the engineering solution.