{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/openpodcar-an-open-source-vehicle-for-self","title":"OpenPodcar: an Open Source Vehicle for Self-Driving Car Research","arxiv_id":"2205.04454","date":"2022-05-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Fanta Camara","Chris Waltham","Grey Churchill","Charles Fox"],"abstract":"OpenPodcar is a low-cost, open source hardware and software, autonomous vehicle research platform based on an off-the-shelf, hard-canopy, mobility scooter donor vehicle. Hardware and software build instructions are provided to convert the donor vehicle into a low-cost and fully autonomous platform. The open platform consists of (a) hardware components: CAD designs, bill of materials, and build instructions; (b) Arduino, ROS and Gazebo control and simulation software files which provide standard ROS interfaces and simulation of the vehicle; and (c) higher-level ROS software implementations and configurations of standard robot autonomous planning and control, including the move_base interface with Timed-Elastic-Band planner which enacts commands to drive the vehicle from a current to a desired pose around obstacles. The vehicle is large enough to transport a human passenger or similar load at speeds up to 15km/h, for example for use as a last-mile autonomous taxi service or to transport delivery containers similarly around a city center. It is small and safe enough to be parked in a standard research lab and be used for realistic human-vehicle interaction studies. System build cost from new components is around USD7,000 in total in 2022. OpenPodcar thus provides a good balance between real world utility, safety, cost and research convenience.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.04454v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.04454v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"openpodcar-an-open-source-vehicle-for-self","repo_url":"https://github.com/openpodcar/openpodcar","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":null}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}