RC Bot Racing

I want my autonomous RC car to be able to know when the wheels are slipping . This will be prerequisite information to detect and predict conditions such as understeer, oversteer, and wheel spin. I believe this will be crucial to maintain control of the car during high speed maneuvers. Wheel Slip Lateral wheel slip is is the angle between the direction the wheel is moving and the direction it is pointing. My plan for this is to use the car's velocity vector as the direction it is moving and to use an onboard magnetometer to determine the direction that the car is pointing. For the front wheels, I'll have to factor in the steering angle as an offset to the wheel's heading, which I can approximate with the steering servo's position. I'm not yet to that stage of the project, so expect more on this later. Longitudinal wheel slip is the percentage of the difference between the surface speed of the wheel compared to the speed between axle and road surface. Positive longit...

A few weeks ago I had a crazy idea to make an autonomous RC car. I've been working on it for a while, so I figured I should start writing down my experience. I'll start with this general overview of what I've done so far, then provide updates or deep dives in later posts. Goals Here's what I'm trying to achieve: The car navigates itself around a course set by waypoints. It has some way of knowing its location, I have some way of setting the waypoints, and I have some way of telling it to start and stop. The car should drive around the course as fast as possible. It should be able to handle and anticipate understeer, oversteer, and wheel slip. Obstacles are not a concern. I want to focus mainly on control of the car, not on the dog that runs out in front of the car. For that, I will need a way to take over manual control of the car at any instant. I do not want to rely on machine learning or computer vision for the primary means of control. I want to build as many of...