Unmanned Systems Technology 036

79 was selected to provide an autonomous shuttle for driverlessly transporting golfers, caddies and tournament workers through the resort’s grounds. Miles Garner, director at RDM Group, says, “We have provided engineering products and services to automotive OEMs for 28 years, but we decided to enter the autonomous vehicle world about eight years ago, following a government open call for SMEs to develop such vehicles. We partnered with Oxford University and won that call, briefly operating our PodZero four-seat pods around the pathways of Milton Keynes [in England].” Since then, RDM has spun off its autonomous vehicle business into Aurrigo, which engineers cabs and shuttles for first/last-mile transportation, particularly for university campuses, hospitals, business parks, retirement villages and similar. Aurrigo at the Welsh Open The Aurrigo shuttle is the company’s newest vehicle, and was originally developed for a fare-based service in Cambridge, which would have been its first UK operator. It is 5.8 m long, 2.28 m wide and 2.54 m tall. Propulsion comes from a 22 kW electric motor, powered by a 47 kWh lithium- polymer battery, enabling up to 124 miles (199.56 km) of range between charges. The battery pack sits with the electric powertrain and transmission near the ground, while the body is installed on the chassis and has been designed and built in-house from a thermoplastic composite (with a foam core) supplied by Omnia, to minimise the weight on the wheels and improve the range and acceleration from the electric drive. The sensor architecture for navigation, localisation and obstacle avoidance has been adapted almost entirely from the arrangement used in the PodZero system. It combines Lidar, cameras, inertial sensing and GNSS via a sensor-fusion algorithm for autonomous operation. “The PodZero was developed in response to a previous call by the UK government, which is investing considerable funds in autonomous vehicles via InnovateUK and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles,” Garner explains. “We won a call to operate three shuttles in the passenger fare-paying service in west Cambridge. Trials of those operations were originally scheduled to start last October, but after two years of designing, optimising and building the shuttles, the intermittent UK lockdowns made such plans untenable. However, it so happened that Sir Terry Matthews, the owner of Celtic Manor Resort, was on the hunt for a self-driving shuttle, intending for the upcoming Welsh Open to become the first golfing tournament in the world to use driverless transportation. He met with RDM Group during the trial of another autonomous vehicle in Ottawa earlier last year, and after discussions and several meetings between the two parties it was agreed that an Aurrigo shuttle would be used to transport golfers, their caddies and key members of staff from the resort’s clubhouse to the opening tee, and back. “All the players, caddies, filming crew, hotel staff and those of us from RDM and Aurrigo had to have a Covid-19 test before being admitted, and we were in the resort complex for two weeks to set things up before the tournament took place, from August 20 to 23,” Garner says. To comply with the hygiene-focused arrangements of the event, the Aurrigo shuttle – which had previously been designed as a 10-passenger vehicle, with additional seating for a safety technician where a driver would ordinarily work and for someone to sit by the technician – had its interior redesigned to carry up to six passengers, with the appropriate social distancing: nominally three golfers and three caddies with their clubs. Before operation Aurrigo’s technicians arrived a week before the Welsh Open started, to prepare for the shuttle’s autonomous operation. Much of that work revolved around mapping the area to be driven in. “We don’t use any external infrastructure in operations, so no beacons, transponder posts or anything like that,” Garner explains. “We just go out to a route, using a special mapping vehicle we call our ‘mule’, which looks similar to our shuttle and has similar sensors in the same places. “Our team drives the mule very slowly, taking waypoints, and recording and georeferencing objects along the way to build up a map for the shuttle to use when it’s time for it to drive.” It took three days for Aurrigo’s technicians to gather sufficient data to map the approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) route, after which extensive simulations were carried out to ensure the vehicle’s autonomy software would be able to seamlessly navigate through it. Each morning in the workshop that Celtic Manor provided Aurrigo with Aurrigo shuttle | In operation Unmanned Systems Technology | February/March 2021 The shuttle was used to make 220 autonomous round trips during the 2020 Wales Open (Images courtesy of Aurrigo)