Building an Autonomous F1/10th Car #1: Intro and Why

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

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, creates courses to teach autonomy foundations, and holds autonomous race‑car competitions involving teams from all over the world.

Read more about Roboracer here.

Here is a video highlight 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 Hokuyo UST‑10‑LX (or better) for their cars. My goal, however, is to attempt to recreate what they have done with pricey components, using 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.