My colleague, Jarek Blusewicz, recently told me about autonomous RC cars and how they can be a fun project for playing around with AI and robotics. I didn’t know that autonomous RC cars were a thing, but it turns out that lots of individuals and teams are playing around with them, and doing awesome work. I found a video of a RC car autonomously drifting around in controlled circles. It is amazing to watch, especially when the camera zooms in on the front wheels steering back and forth to maintain the drift as the car slides over the surface. It looks like a professional driver, but the car is completely controlled by a computer.

Researchers at Georgia Tech created an autonomous rally RC car for “aggressive off-road driving”. They really mean aggressive! The car hits a turn at almost full speed and then power slides through it while kicking up clouds of dirt. Here’s a picture of their AutoRally car in action.

The best part about the Georgia Tech work is that it is all open source, with a site on Github including detailed instructions about how to build the car (it wouldn’t be cheap, but could be great for a group or organization).

The AutoRally car is controlled with a reinforcement learning algorithm, which I have been finding to be widespread for controlling robots in general. It’s something that I would like to learn more about and play with.