The other day a commenter to this blog’s signature included a reference to Robocar racing. I had never heard of that before and learned about an amazing activity involving developing and racing self-driving RC-style, scale-model cars.
Robocars is sort of like the grassroots version of the AWS Deepracer program. This post will simply be a repository of cool information I indulge myself in finding.
Chris Anderson’s Introduction to DIY Robocars
References
- DIY Robocars – similar in concept to the old DIY drones site.
RomiCar Installation
Given that I have a pile of Pololu Romi’s, I’m giving installing a ROS/OpenCV stack onto my Raspberry Pi & Camera equipped Romi.
Hardware Installation
STL file for a simple roll-cage and camera mount is available upon request.
Software Installation Failure: Raspbian Buster (Busted?!?)
- Raspbian Buster installed with WiFi and camera configured. Download from the Raspberry Pi foundation and burn to disk with Balena Etcher. Initial boot connected to the TV and a mouse to set up VNC, then WiFi password entered over VNC.
- Install ROS Kinetic according to the instructions here.
Despite the warnings on the top of the linked page, Raspbian is being used here. I used Ubuntu MATE on other installations and may choose to do so again, but not what I’m doing here unless I have too.
Issues Encountered:
OPENCV2 Build Failure. Tried this fix when opencv2 failed to build:
https://github.com/opencv/opencv/issues/14856
At Which Point I QUIT.
Software Installation: Ubuntu MATE and ROS Melodic
- Ubuntu MATE installed with WiFi and camera configured. Download from the Raspberry Pi foundation and burn to disk with Balena Etcher. Initial boot connected to the TV and a mouse to set up VNC, then WiFi password entered over VNC.
- Install ROS Melodic according to the instructions here.
Issues Encountered:
ROS signature failure fixed by installing the new ROS signature from here.