AV4EV: Open-Source Modular Autonomous Electric Vehicle Platform

Overview

AV4EV is an open-source autonomous electric go-kart platform designed to make real-world mobility research more accessible to universities and research labs. The vehicle fills a critical gap between small-scale RC platforms and full-size autonomous cars by providing high-fidelity sensing, onboard computing, and more representative vehicle dynamics than reduced-scale platforms at a fraction of the cost and risk of a full-scale autonomous vehicle (AV).

Built on a modified TopKart chassis, AV4EV supports manual, teleoperated, and fully autonomous driving. Its ROS 2-based software stack enables repeatable development, testing, and deployment of perception, localization, planning, and control algorithms in the real world. The platform follows a software-defined vehicle (SDV) philosophy so autonomy software developed on the go-kart can transfer to other vehicle platforms without being rebuilt from scratch.

All build instructions, documentation, and links to the open-source hardware and software repositories are available at AV4EV.org.

Publications

• AV4EV: Open-Source Modular Autonomous Electric Vehicle Platform for Making Mobility Research Accessible
  Zhijie Qiao, Mingyan Zhou, Zhijun Zhuang, Tejas Agarwal, Felix Jahncke, Po-Jen Wang, Jason Friedman, Hongyi Lai, Divyanshu Sahu, Tomáš Nagy, Martin Endler, Jason Schlessman, Rahul Mangharam
  IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), 2024 Link to paper

Contributors

Zhijie Qiao, Mingyan Zhou, Zhijun Zhuang, Tejas Agarwal, Felix Jahncke, Po-Jen Wang, Jason Friedman, Hongyi Lai, Divyanshu Sahu, Tomáš Nagy, Martin Endler, Jason Schlessman, Rahul Mangharam

Citation

@inproceedings{qiao2024av4ev,
  title={Av4ev: Open-source modular autonomous electric vehicle platform for making mobility research accessible},
  author={Qiao, Zhijie and Zhou, Mingyan and Zhuang, Zhijun and Agarwal, Tejas and Jahncke, Felix and Wang, Po-Jen and Friedman, Jason and Lai, Hongyi and Sahu, Divyanshu and Nagy, Tom{\'a}{\v{s}} and others},
  booktitle={2024 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)},
  pages={2942--2947},
  year={2024},
  organization={IEEE}
}