The car hardware is now largely complete, so I thought I’d share a couple of images.
The construction has 3 decks.
- The lowest has a Raspberry Pi with power supply which connects to the front facing camera. For now, this is just collecting video data. In future, I would like the vehicle to be guided by this system, although I might replace the RPi with a Jetson Nano for that.
- The second deck has a ESP32 and RTK GNSS system. The ESP32 receives RTCM data from a laptop via an ESP-Now based link. The same link is used by the car to send telemetry data to the base station.
The ESP32 also listens to an R/C receiver. It decodes three channels: throttle, steering and a three position switch. The switch selects the mode: record (the car can be manually driven around the track with the R/C controller in this mode. As it does this, the car records a GNSS “bread-crumb” trail), stop, and autonomous (where the car follows the previously defined trail). - The top layer holds the GNSS antenna. The antenna sits above a foil ground plane.
Following a conversation with DonK, I plan to make it possible to adjust the height of the camera above the track. It is currently set to 120mm, but Don has suggested that 300mm is a better position. It would be nice to be able to capture data at several heights in order to compare the performance of the lane following system for different settings.
Team PiDrogen 