Autonomous RC Car Electronics ?
 

Hi All,
Does anyone on the forum have experience with building an Autonomous RC Car?

There seem to be several different Autonomous RC Car Racing programs;

1. Autonomous Racing Leagues/Competitions
2. NXP Cup
3. MXcarkit Autonomous Driving Challenge
4. NVIDIA’s DIY Autonomous Car Race

So far the most interesting project that I have found is the the build uses;

1. NVIDIA Jetson Nano (or Raspberry Pi ?)
2. ROS Software
3. 4X YDLIDAR - LIDAR $79
4. VESC Software
5. VESC $107
6. Plus chassis (thinking TT02), Brushless Motor, Batteries, etc.

I am also interested in learning about;

1. Ardupilot Rover
2. QGroundcontrol
3. Pixhawk

I welcome any suggestions or guidance. Thank you!

This looks super fun, but there's a bit of a backlog in my build pipeline to explore this just yet :). The project described in the video doesn't look like it's had an update for 2 years. I fear the reality of dealing with the LIDAR and navigation could be a decent challenge.

If you follow the bouncing ball on the NVIDIA series, you end up at a pretty comprehensive set of instructions for both hardware (based on a TT02) and software with some working examples:
https://github.com/NVIDIA-AI-IOT/jetracer

There are probably lots of other avenues to explore. The best performing autonomous setups use multiple input types - computational power and complexity rise pretty quickly.

Dear PDR
Thank you for sharing the NVIDIA Jetracer! I was interested to see that they are using a camera instead of a LIDAR.

Would appreciate any additional suggestions, I have looked for the NVIDIA Jetson and it seems out of stock everywhere (or very expensive) with the COVID-19 chip storage.

+ I know the "backlog in build pipeline" well, for me that is much of the fun of the hobby; dreaming about the next projects. Cheers.

Check out DIY Robocars and Donkey Car. They share a huge, helpful community on Discord (invite link). The members there will help you even if you aren't using a Donkey Car.

I was able to snag a Jetson Nano before the prices and stock went insane, but I struggled to get it running ROS at an adequate speed. I might have been doing it wrong, though!

Here's a link to my own, somewhat stagnant project: Robocar - TB05

Edit: the guy who started DIY Robocars, and who is very active on the Discord, was one of the people involved in creating Pixhawk and Ardupilot.

Would like to add for anyone else that may find this thread 2nd hand Amazon deep racer kits are pretty cheap 70 to 200 dollars