Chassis

This section covers aspects of building the chassis and tires for the vehicle for competition.

Steering mechanism

Even though the game rules of the Future Engineering competition do not require you to build your own vehicle but allow you to use an RC (remote controlled) toy car as a base, some may find it useful to design everything from the very beginning. It will allow you to get granular control over the hardware, increase efficiency, and reduce errors introduced by third party implementations.

The design of the vehicle is determined by which approach is chosen to drive the rear wheels and implement the steering mechanics. Usually, in the most simple case, the rear wheels are fixed on the same axle and rotated by one DC motor. The steering mechanism on the front axle could be built in several ways - the idea is to change the angle of the front wheels, thereby changing direction.

Since these concepts are already widely implemented in RC toy cars and RC sport vehicles, it makes sense to research available materials.

For example, this video presents one of the ways to build the steering mechanism:

Build a steering vehicle

More videos referenced in the next list consider other approaches to achieve the same goal: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Once you get a basic understanding of what your vehicle could look like, you can look at the following instructions which could help you to think of the assembling process in more professional manner:

SunFounder PiCar-V Kit V2.0

Click on the picture or here to read the instructions.

Note that some instructions above use two motors to rotate the rear wheels. In some cases it will make the control of the vehicle more complex, since the motors could rotate asynchronously, and that needs to be compensated for in the steering.

Tires

During experiments you may find that the vehicle's tires do not have enough friction with the field surface, so it makes sense to consider creating your own tires for the wheels.

Make tires by yourself

The following links could give you other brilliant ideas for how to make the tires for the vehicle: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.