Our project goal was to transform a Traxxas Rustler RC vehicle into an autonomous car that could navigate a given path, which is shown on the home page. The idea behind this project was to create a car that operates much like a real autonomous vehicle which does not require human control to operate safely.
Credit: Traxxas
This transformation was completed by programming a Raspberry Pi, using Python code and the Robot Operating System (ROS), with sensors that gathered and transmitted information about the car’s external surroundings to the Pi.
While our original plan was to use a line tracking sensor to navigate the car around a fixed path, our objective switched to not using a line to help the car navigate. Therefore, we utilized a Raspberry PiCamera sensor to accomplish our goals. We implemented an image processing technique that masked certain HSV (hue-saturation-value) values from input images and steered the car based on the average center value of the masked image.
