Autopilot and radio suggestions for autonomous car (slow crawler)

Hi,

I’ve been tasked with sourcing parts for a car that meets the following requirements, and having 0 experience with RC other than watching channels such as rctestflight and rclifeon, I have no idea where to start. I’ll start out with a short list of potential requirements:

  • 500m radio range (ideally speced for 1-1.5km for redundancy)
  • Long mission time (potentially as high 24h with solar panels)
  • Travel at an average speed of 0.3km/h (10cm/sec)
  • Ability to go up to 5km/h if needed (obviously this will sacrifice mission time)
  • RC as well as Autonomous control
  • GPS

So far in my research, I’ve come to the conclusion that I likely wanted to get an Holybro 433Mhz SiK RX/TX set, and use them for Ardupilot ↔ Mission planner communication. I’ve also decided that for RC control it’s probably just easiest to use Mission Planner’s RC_OVERRIDE with a controller plugged into my laptop, however if there’s a problem with this idea please let me know.

I have no idea which autopilot to select, however it needs to be able to run Ardurover and potentially control 4 ESCs as well as 1 servo (although most likely only 1 or 2 ESCs).

I also have no idea about which ESCs or motors I’d pick, but I figured it was best to sort out the more complicated side of radios and autopilot first and select those afterwards.

I would appreciate any feedback regarding my suggested configuration, as well as some pointers for an autopilot and potentially even ESC/motor combos for such an application