Optimizing a Full Self Driving RC Car

[kscottz]

https://hackaday.com/2023/04/17/robot-races-a-little-smarter-to-go-faster/

[detrites]

This article mainly summarises a video if you'd rather watch:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=R87Qlq_wSY8&

[outside1234]

Beyond the software to do this - is there a hardware explainer for the chassis and rest of the kit they are using to build this anywhere?

[genpfault → outside1234]

[1] has a video[2] along with some slides[3].

[1]: https://stevengong.co/notes/F1TENTH/#about-the-f1tenth-car

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV8lAwcIW0I&list=PL868twsx7O...

[3]: https://linklab-uva.github.io/autonomousracing/assets/files/...

[aiNohY6g]

Reminds me re-volt ^^

[Arrath → aiNohY6g]

Re-volt and its contemporary, Toy Commander, really kindled in me a love of literally 'small scale' games. As a kid I thought it was pretty cool to do a race around a super sized garage, darting under the car and up and over the lawnmower, or having a dogfight around a mountain sized christmas tree in the lounge.

[whoami_nr → aiNohY6g]

Agreed. Reminded me rc-bandit. Used to spend countless hours on that game back in the 2000s.

[barbazoo → aiNohY6g]

Thanks for mentioning that, I loved that game but totally forgot about it.

[bfrog]

Man I wanted to do just this sort of thing 15 years ago but of course the sensors and processing power weren’t really small or powerful enough then.

So cool.

[mrguyorama → bfrog]

Somewhere in the archives is an article of a "self driving racing rc car" sport of some sort where the creator used a camera looking at the ceiling and mapping the lights to localize itself on the track. Way cooler IMO. Everything gets easier in SLAM when you can just burn $1k on lidar.

[bfrog → mrguyorama]

Seriously. Lidars 15 years ago from sick were huge and way more than $1k

I tried with cameras and other sensors, made it very hard to do slam reliably.

I imagine slam algorithms have also improved a good deal.