How to Teledrive a Modded car from anywhere in the World over the Internet
- How to remotely drive a vehicle from anywhere in the world?
- Teledrive ie remote drive is a useful idea.
- One application: UAVs are flown around the world for surveillance while sitting in the comfort of a terrestrial ground station.
- Another example is to drive a Truck over the network like here: Einride Remote Drive Prototype
- Customising a commercial EV even though a very exciting exercise has its own challenges and timelines.
- 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.
- 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.
- There have been many mods of expensive RC car like the Traxxas car. Traxxas RC cars
- But these are expensive and hence a low cost solution is needed
- There are many Off the Shelf RC cars. But they are usually very small and cannot be driven on the roads.
- Was lucky to find a large RC car about 2 feet in length.
- It came with all the fitments: battery compartment, shocks, Ackerman steering mechanism ,etc The unmodded vehicle is as shown below
- The new RC vehicle is low cost so car lifetime might vary.
- The Remote control would get stuck and this would have its own challenges.
- 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.
- The vehicle was modded and stripped down to the chassis.
- Motor drives for the 3 motors were added.
- A RPI for drive control and also for streaming camera feed. Standard RPI camera.
- An Airtel 4G SIM with a Quectel modem module.
- A drone LiPo battery with voltage regulators.
- An IP 65 box was used to house all the hardware
- 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
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