A pretty hefty battery-powered car controlled over 4G. It is driven with a wheel and a VR headset, and it has a pan-tilt camera mounted which follows your head movements.
It was built for Mottagningen at Chalmers as a showcase for the CASE makerspace.
The car with all electronics visible
At the core is a Raspberry Pi which receives input and transmits video over WiFi via a hotspot on my phone, which is taped onto the vehicle when I'm not taking photos. It however had to be extended with an Arduino Nano to run the servos, since the RPi doesn't have enough hardware PWM channels. Using software PWM proved to be far too jittery.
The camera is an OAK-D which was what I had at hand at the time. At some point there was an idea to use the depth sensing of it to displace the texture shown to the driver as to give them depth perception, but the video is already jittery enough without adding extra processing and data to stream.
Here the car almost got run over by a full-scale car
Everything is brought togther using VVVV where all VR and wheel input is collected and sent to the car. The video stream is also displayed in a window in 3D in order to reduce motion sickness and compensate for the roundtrip and servo latency.
A video showing the car in motion:
The shakiness of the camera is a major issue. It's likely because the camera centre of mass is not aligned with the axis of rotation of the servos. Using a lighter and wider FOV camera would also help. Not having sound from the car really limits your spatial awareness, so greater FOV would help with that too.