Skip to main content

TeleDrive an RC car from anywhere in the world

How to Teledrive a Modded car from anywhere in the World over the Internet 

  1. How to remotely drive a vehicle from anywhere in the world?
  2. Teledrive ie remote drive is a useful idea.
  3. One application: UAVs are flown around the world for surveillance while sitting in the comfort of a terrestrial ground station.
  4. Another example is to drive a Truck over the network like here: Einride Remote Drive Prototype 
  5. Customising a commercial EV even though a very exciting exercise has its own challenges and timelines.
    1. Need to understand the mechanical angle and also the hardware angle, say identify relevant motors, torques and install and check they perform optimally. Will have to be iterated multiple times.
  6. A better option would be to try all the experiments on a small scale, say on a toy. Something similar to the Flight of Phoenix (2004) movie.
  7. There have been many mods of expensive RC car like the Traxxas car. Traxxas RC cars
    1. But these are expensive and hence a low cost solution is needed
  8.  There are many Off the Shelf RC cars. But they are usually very small and cannot be driven on the roads.
  9. Was lucky to find a large RC car about 2 feet in length.
    1. It came with all the fitments: battery compartment, shocks, Ackerman steering mechanism ,etc The unmodded vehicle is as shown below
  10. The new RC vehicle is low cost so car lifetime might vary.
    1. The Remote control would get stuck and this would have its own challenges.
  11. This vehicle is pretty fast as it has 2 motors, 1 each for back and front and an additional one for the steering. The Steering motor does not have fine control. It also has a set of lights but they were not very useful in the dark.
  12. The vehicle was modded and stripped down to the chassis. 
    1. Motor drives for the 3 motors were added.
    2. A RPI for drive control and also for streaming camera feed. Standard RPI camera.
    3. An Airtel 4G SIM with a Quectel modem module.
    4. A drone LiPo battery with voltage regulators.
    5. An IP 65 box was used to house all the hardware   
  13. And the result:






  • Now need night driving support too 
  • Added a bicycle light on the chassis as follows




Driving
  • The video and control path from the Modded Car is accessible at an AWS location.
  • One can connect from anywhere in the world and drive the car. Attached below is the video of it being driven remotely. The  FPV and the rearview











Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Game for the blind

Have been thinking about writing a game for the blind since a long time Got an opportunity when a couple of High School Kids came up with the requirement Many options were experimented on: Scratch, Unity, etc It was decided to Keep it Simple and modding an existing game What other better than to implement in python and use python games Used an example from here  PyGame Pythonprogramming.net example   This is a car game where one has to avoid blocks in its path or falling on it To make it suitable for blind playing, visual representation of a block falling on the car or not and the speed of it falling were alerted to the user by means of different sounds; one tone for block not being in line with the car, one tone for slow rate of drop on the car and one tone for rapid rate of drop on the car. So hearing these sound clues, one can use the cursor keys to escape the falling blocks. This can be seen in the video. One can also play comfortably with their eyes closed. It can be impr...
2 comments
Read more

Leg Brake for a Bicycle

Leg Brake on a Bicycle  Growing up, there was a need to learn how to drive a geared motor cycle and also get a driver's license. There are two categories of two wheeler licenses: one for geared vehicles usually with leg brakes and one for auto/non-geared vehicles where the braking happens by hand and are simpler to operate. Driving license had already been acquired for the non-geared vehicle but due to lack of availability of a geared vehicle for practice, the acquiring of this license was taking quite some time. The main problem was adapting to braking a vehicle using the leg where one to respond differently and the conditioning takes some time. Unfortunately could not manage to get anybody/s vehicle for learning after many attempts. And at that time (1995 or so) bicycles were rather common and used for transport. So an idea was: why not add such a feature to a bicycle. A Hercules Town and Trek was also available. After some visits to the local bicycle shop and a used vehicle part...
Post a Comment
Read more

RGB Dot Matrix Display as Multi-Function Panel Display

PxMatrix on ESP8266 connected to an 32x16 RGB DOT MATRIX 1/8 SCAN Panel It was always wonderful to see the numerous colour displays that display messages and animations on Dot Matrix Displays (DMD) in the commercial places. One useful thing would be to take an Off-the-Shelf Display and run fully controllable custom software rather than rely on some external products to do. Luckily found a display vendor who offered to give me some DMD as samples for experimentation. I was given a P10 32x16 pixel color DMD panel. I have experimented with Monochrome DMDs (maybe blog about this later) but the RGB display is another world all together. The Monochrome world does not have lot of open source software, the RGB world has PxMatrix, RGBMatrix and SmartMatrix. As I wanted the controlling entity to be super cheap which meant use of an 8266 I had to start with PxMatrix. Though there are better options than PxMatrix, the others use a more expensive controller. Its better to start with the lowest cost...
Post a Comment
Read more