JMU Tests Out Autonomous Vehicle Aimed to Help Retirement Communities

NBC 12 reports that researchers at James Madison University (JMU) in Virginia are developing an autonomous vehicle to benefit retirement communities by helping transport seniors. Two years ago, the JMU Autonomous Cart (JACart) research group began a project with faculty and students to retrofit golf cart that can sense objects and drive a path on its own within 15 weeks. Last year the team received a $120,000 grant through the Jeffress Trust Awards Program in Interdisciplinary Research to continue the work, and this week it tested out its second autonomous golf cart on JMU's campus. The cart combines computers, cameras, and sensors to drive a passenger to multiple locations via voice command. "The earliest deployments of completely autonomous systems are likely to be in these retirement communities because they're these closed campuses with low speeds," said JMU's Nathan Sprague. "So that actually solves a lot of the autonomy problems and makes them simpler and it's a community that could really benefit from this technology."