01 - RC to Autonomous Car

My neighbor got me into RC cars (by giving my son one, who was fascinated). I now have an HBX 903A, which I intend to upgrade and use as a fun development platform to revisit some of my previous life in robotics.

It's a pretty stock standard RC car, a combined radio receiver - motor controller handles all the input from the remote and passes 3 phase power to the brushless DC motor. The controller is simple, it has basic steering, throttle and reverse, as well as some basic settings of a speed limiter, left/right trim, and steering D/R (ie how hard it turns).

I plan to update the platform to add both some sensors and the reasoning ability to do an autonomous lap around my neighborhood with a given map (I live in an enclave that's sort of figure 8 configuration).

While I played with the idea of streaming the sensor data back to a home base and transmitting the controls to the car, I think the risk of it going out of range is too great, plus the whole idea of an autonomous car should be that it has all required functionality to work onboard.

Next step is going to be determining exactly what hardware I can get on the platform, including needing to replace the motor controller.