In grad school, one of the classes I took was on Intelligent and Safe Robotics. In this class, I worked on the F1Tenth (now Roboracer) platform. In F1Tenth competitions, different teams compete with their autonomous racecars that are 1/10th the scale of an F1 car. This competition usually occurs in conferences like ICRA 2025.
Roboracer is a community of researchers, engineers, and enthusiasts. Roboracer develops an open-source platform for autonomous systems research, develop courses to teach autonomy foundations, and hold autonomous race car competitions involving teams from all over the world.
Read more about Roboracer here:
Here is a video hightlight that shows teams performing in head-to-head races.
Why this project?
Most Roboracer teams that compete use pricey components like the Traxxas 1/10 RC racecar, Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano, and Hokuyou UST-10-LX (or better) for their cars. My goal, however, is to attempt to recreate what they have done with pricey components, with relatively cheap components.
My idea is to use a Raspberry Pi 5 for computation and the Tamiya TT-02B (which I have purchased) as the chassis.
Understandably, I have no idea if it will work out very well, but I am hopeful. I will update the series as I purchase more components and build.
Let me know what you think. See you in the next one!
P.S.: The cover image was generated by Gemini 3 Pro.
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