Introduction

The PiCar project is a miniature four-wheeled car powered by a Raspberry Pi 3 board. This lab-scale autonomous research platform is easy to build and modify. A camera and LIDAR mounted on the car allows for complex computer vision algorithms.

The PiCar repository contains all the software and hardware source files required to duplicate the car, including:

• Chassis 3D printing, and CAD sources.
• Raspberry Pi 3 breakout PCB to connect peripherals and draw power from LiPo battery.
• Source code of the following sofware modules capable of:
• Acquire wheel RPM data using encoder.
• Acquire acceleration, angular velocity, and compass data from an I²C LSM9DS1 IMU.
• Acquire video data from a Raspberry Pi NoIR camera.
• Perform real-time computer vision using camera data.
• Control the speed of brushed DC motor.

The purpose of this documentation is to create a full fledged, clear formal guide for using the PiCar project. It will also serve as a place for showcasing results.