JetRacer — High-Speed AI Racing Robot

JetRacer — High-Speed AI Racing Robot

JetRacer is an open-source AI race car built on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano. It uses a 1/10th-scale RC car chassis with a Jetson Nano mounted on top, enabling neural-network-based road following at speeds exceeding typical educational robots. Steering is controlled by a servo and throttle by an ESC, both commanded directly from the Jetson via I²C.

JetRacer ships with Jupyter notebook examples for data collection, training, and live inference of a road-following network (a ResNet18 regression model predicting x/y deviation from center).

Hardware

• NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit
• 1/10-scale RC car chassis (e.g. Waveshare JetRacer Pro)
• Front-facing wide-angle camera
• PCA9685 PWM servo controller
• 7.4V Li-ion battery
• 5V power bank for Jetson

What It Can Do

• Road following — ResNet18 regresses steering angle from a single camera frame at inference-time
• Object following — detects and tracks objects using SSD MobileNet
• Live teleoperation — gamepad-driven control via Jupyter widgets
• Data collection — annotate frames in-browser by dragging a target point

Source

• Repo: https://github.com/NVIDIA-AI-IOT/jetracer
• License: MIT

Printing

JetRacer is built on a commercial 1/10-scale RC car chassis — the chassis, motor, ESC, servo and wheels are all purchased, not printed. The only printed parts are the Jetson/camera mounting plates and adapters, so this is a small set by design (not under-populated). Which parts you print depends on which RC chassis you own — the two chassis options are mutually exclusive.

Print the generic part (always):

• jetracer_cam_mount — the wide-angle camera mount (shared across both chassis)

If you have a Traxxas LaTrax Rally chassis (the BOM's default) — print these 2:

• jetracer_latrax_base_board — base plate that bolts the Jetson + electronics to the LaTrax chassis
• jetracer_latrax_cam_mount — LaTrax-specific camera mount riser

If you have a Tamiya TT-02 chassis instead — print this 1:

• jetracer_tamiya_tt02_base_board — base plate for the Tamiya TT-02 chassis

Tooling (not a robot part):

• jetracer_tamiya_tt02_drill_jig is a drill guide used to mark/drill the mounting holes on the Tamiya TT-02 chassis during assembly. Print it only if you're doing the Tamiya build; it's discarded after drilling and is not part of the finished car.

So a typical LaTrax build prints 3 parts (cam_mount + 2 LaTrax); a Tamiya build prints 2 parts + the drill jig. You do not print both chassis' boards.

Not printed: NVIDIA Jetson Nano, the RC chassis/motor/ESC/servo/wheels, PCA9685 PWM controller, camera, and batteries are all sourced per the BOM.