TenthGear
TenthGear
This project designs, builds, and validates a 1/10th-scale autonomous RoboRacer vehicle, capable of safely navigating an unknown indoor race track at competitive speeds. The vehicle must complete multiple laps autonomously without collisions while meeting strict performance requirements, which consist of an average lap speed of at least 3 m/s, lateral tracking error no greater than 0.2 m, obstacle detection at ranges up to 8 m at 10 Hz, and emergency-stop response within 0.5 seconds. The hardware platform is built on a 1/10th-scale Traxxas chassis equipped with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano for onboard computation, a Hokuyo 2D LiDAR for environment sensing, a VESC 6 motor controller for throttle control, and a servo-based steering system powered by a 3S LiPo battery through a custom power distribution board. A custom laser-cut acrylic deck was designed and fabricated to support a balanced, reliable hardware integration. On the software side, the vehicle runs Ubuntu and ROS 2 Humble with a modular node architecture spanning sensing, localization, planning, control, logging, and safety monitoring. The autonomy stack combines SLAM-based localization, Follow-The-Gap reactive obstacle avoidance, waypoint recording, Pure Pursuit trajectory tracking, and Model Predictive Path Planning for optimized trajectory generation. A DriveMux node arbitrates between controllers, allowing Follow-The-Gap to override other planners when unsafe conditions are detected. All components were validated in the F1Tenth simulation environment and visualized through RViz prior to physical deployment.