El Plan
Made by marouane-sharry / Artificial intelligence / Automotive / Drones / Games & Gaming / IoT
About the project
Ok so here is the challenge : I have 72 hours to make a autonomous car for the nxp cup. So it’s just me alone and a highly sophisticated card from company with a billion dollar net worth , How hard could it be ? ( very hard)
Items used in this project
Hardware components
Story
EL PLAN : THE BEGINNING
So now basically I was alone , left with 3 week ends to prepare the car for the qualifier and the final , knowing that I'm currently an full time intern at TDK .
What I had was the newly provided kit and NO TRACK 😂 so let's start with that.
EL PLAN WEEK END N°1 : MAKING THE TRACK
The track that I had where old tracks from 2016 when the NXP CUP took place in Grenoble , but since then no new track were available , I had to create the SVG from the tracks and use a laser cutter to CUT the race track.
Big shoutout to the FABMSTIC lab and Germain for allowing me to use their laser cutter
Go check their website : https://fabmastic.imag.fr/pages/le-fablab-mastic.html
Afterwards I had to do some painting and then I was done with this I had to do some painting and then VOILA I was done !
EL PLAN WEEK END N°2 : IT IS LIGHTS OUT AND THE WAY WE GO !
Now before assembling the car and making all the necessary wiring , I noticed that something was wrong with the kit provided.
In fact the turning radius of the car wouldn't allow U turns and 270 turns around a regular track :
Now according my calculation and my really HIGH level in maths we have the following :
To find the turning radius, we can use the formula:
Turning radius = Wheelbase / sin(Turning angle)
Plugging in the values we have:
Turning radius = 23 cm / sin(30 degrees) Turning radius = 46cm / 1 (since sin(30 degrees) = 0.5)
Therefore, the turning radius is 46 cm
The track is 55 cm wide with the two outter lines , wich leaves us with 51cm.
So basically there's no room for error , and you have to get the perfect timing . Hence I decided to move to another plaftorm with the Wltoys 144001 with a wheelbase of 19cm !
- SETUP
The setup of the car wasn't hard overall and the gitbook made it very easy and straightforward expect for the arming method where we should use a RC remote that is prohibited during the competition.
But after few minutes I found a way to fix everything up ... and by fixing it I mean deleting some parts of the actual code until it worked 😎
- CODING
Well for this part there's not much to say , I knew before receiving the kit that the car would most likely use a PID controller. Honestly there's no better video than this one bellow to explain what a PID means for beginners .
- GOING FOR A FIRST RIDE
Here we go with the first try , not too bad , the PID is well adjusted and I got a new support for the camera :
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cxgE-BhiALA
The problem was that I had no tire grip and the brakes were not strong enough to get the car to desired speed after one whole day I was like this :
... so I lowered the car and found out that the car had a remote to add some brake power !!!
AND NOW WOWY TAKE A LOOK AT THE CAR :
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hvdaVV6hA6s
https://youtube.com/shorts/8uuD2FLrms0?feature=share
It's handling well the intersection but I have some problem with the ZigZags ...
Conclusion
Honestly there's much to say but at this point I'm just suuuuuuuupper lazy to write all that down , I will make a video to explain everything in the details but from now on my goal with MEA team from France also is :
Schematics, diagrams and documents
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