Robotics is a fantastic research area and an ideal STEM project for high schools. As robot platforms are very expensive and model cars are rather limited, we decided to develop a robotics platform based on a kids’ ride-on car. These cars already have drive-by-wire built-in and are fully remote controlled, so the only hardware interfacing required is to modify the remote transmitter and to add a remote emergency stop for safety reasons. The result is an open-ended autonomous vehicle project for high schools. The information given in this document can be freely distributed and we hope we will get a number of high schools to participate and build their own autonomous ride-on car (ARC), maybe even set up a competition
The goal for each team is to let the car drive along a sequence of given GPS way points.
We decided to not include too much detail on application software, because we want high school teams to develop their own programs rather than copy our solution.
Please feel free to contact us for any questions (see addresses at the end of this document) and, of course, send us some videos of your builds. We hope this project will create an interest to study Automation & Robotics Engineering at UWA.