GPS antenna for an outdoor autonomous vehicle?

[DonRotolo]

Well, RADAR is probably the best bet for this kind of use. That's what cars use, and they surely have some smart people designing them.

But perhaps having a person inside for safety isn't such a bad idea. 4000 pounds at 30 MPH is a lot of energy.

Collision avoidance could be done with a camera. In theory, the view ahead of a pace car should be fairly well characterized - basically nobody in front - and so if anything not normal is 'seen' >>go to safe mode.

Additionally, the car could navigate with a combination of inertial, odometry, magnetic compass, camera and GPS.

Inertial means accelerometers and rate gyroscopes. Odometery measures distance. You know what a compass does. The camera can spot visual cues placed around the track (think "vision target", like 3 orange dots( And GPS. Take all these together, correlate them with one another, and you can probably get it to follow a race line....

But this task is not trivial, and safety remains a concern. I would bet this is beyond the capabilities of a high school robotics team. A little help from college students would change that, but this is almost a DARPA-level thing.