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Smart wheels for golf buggies
Client
Concourse Golf
Category
Consumer
Services
Push buggies in golf have a lot of advantages being light-weight and easily folded for transport in car boots. In comparison, electric buggies tend to be heavier and more expensive. Concourse Golf saw an opportunity to combine the best of both worlds by developing a smart self-powered wheel that could be retrofitted to most existing push buggies.
Concourse Golf's Smart Wheels have high-torque brushless motors with integrated lithium batteries that deliver performance over 27 holes with a four-hour recharge time. Seven forward speeds as well as reverse, zero turn and active speed recovery, deliver a superior performance to other electric golf buggies. A key feature of the system is an intuitive precision steering system with remote control up to 50m, delivering straight-line tracking even over undulating terrain. Dynamic downhill braking and incline pace management add to an easy experience for the golfer.
Genesys inherited this project from another designer which could not get the buggy to track true across undulating terrain. With deep expertise in inertial navigation systems, Genesys was able to solve the problem by automatically detecting changes in the terrain through a sensitive on-board accelerometer and gyroscope, and adjust the drive of each wheel independently to compensate for drift away from the desired straight line.
Manufacturing assembly images supplied curtesy of Circuitwise Electronics Manufacturing
After taking on the project, Genesys added an additional PCA to facilitate several changes to the design. Other key changes included Bluetooth connectivity in each wheel to facilitate wheel-to-wheel communication in order to improve the range to the remote controller and enable the straight-line tracking algorithm.
To support the manufacturing process (see illustrative picture above) by Circuitwise Electronics Manufacturing, we developed a programming set up and a test plan.
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