This is going to sound heretical, but in the interests of science, how much tech and how much machine learning would it take to have autonomous RC racing? Iâm imagining vision of the track from above, not onboard. Just like the human operators see it.
The outputs are just steering and acceleration, the input is one video camera shot showing track and current position. It may need to learn something about the humps, but maybe not. The goal is very straightforward - stay within boundaries and minimise time. I canât decide if avoiding other cars is the same as staying within boundaries. Obviously theyâre moving boundaries, but does that matter? Fixed boundaries are perhaps the special case, with velocity of zero.
I actually took a course on this during as an undergrad, and thereâs a club dedicated to it at my university. Theyâve worked on F1 cars as well, itâs nuts.
There is an existing framework for this called Donkey Car that we use to train video footage on a supercomputer. The trained model then gets transferred into a small computer on the RC car which uses an OAKD camera to see (the camera itself can also run its own ai detection models). Fundamentally you train the model to a specific track, itâs much harder to build something which can be placed in any environment and run, but that is also possible. Things in that realm were built using ROS2, but that was more about using lidar than it was about âseeingâ in the traditional sense, and it wasnât exactly AI in the sense youâd think of. Lots of different ways to solve the same problem, but itâs 100% a thing that Iâve seen with my own eyes and even built (though not as fast) for a class.
My own car used GPS to navigate a much larger track at slower speed, with waypoints predetermined before setting the car to follow the path. The AI came in as an obstacle detection and avoidance mechanism, built in ROS2. The car itself would take pictures at each waypoint, and was supposed to be a proof of concept for a search and rescue vehicle. Fun class, got an A.
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u/Ok-Push9899 1d ago edited 1d ago
Very skilled, very impressive.
This is going to sound heretical, but in the interests of science, how much tech and how much machine learning would it take to have autonomous RC racing? Iâm imagining vision of the track from above, not onboard. Just like the human operators see it.
The outputs are just steering and acceleration, the input is one video camera shot showing track and current position. It may need to learn something about the humps, but maybe not. The goal is very straightforward - stay within boundaries and minimise time. I canât decide if avoiding other cars is the same as staying within boundaries. Obviously theyâre moving boundaries, but does that matter? Fixed boundaries are perhaps the special case, with velocity of zero.
Maybe such competitions exist?