Converting a Car to Remote Control in 72 Hours

This was a really fun event held by a now-defunct robotics club in Southeast Queensland. Five teams each were given

• a second hand stock car,
• a decent RC controller and receiver,
• linear and rotary actuators,
• encoders and potentiometers,
• an arduino mega and an NVIDIA TX2,
• a webcam and GPS unit,
• power supplies, batteries; and
• access to a fabrication team.

We had 72 hours to make the car do some basic GPS following routines on a closed track. We couldn't make GPS following work in the time allotted but did get remote control functional. Photos documented for posterity.

Address to participants before starting. Five cars are still fresh at this point.

The five cars at the end of the competition. Mount Tambourine in the background.

Our team preparing for 'acceptance testing'

Doing some stuff with YOLO v2

The boys having a chat.

Pulling out the stock steering column, which had an EPS that we wouldn't have been able to hack in time allowed.

Playing around with bad DIN rail electrical distribution setup in footwell.