Good afternoon! As I understand it - your mod duplicates some things AAI Programmable Vehicles?
Good morning! Autodrive is more basic than AAI: Select one or more vehicles and send them somewhere. If you really want to, you can also program routes. That requires the "Shortwave" mod: Place a radio, link it to one or more vehicles, and hook up a lot of combinators that calculate waypoints and send the positions to the radio for transmission.
Is the remote control system for appliances in your mod simpler? Or is it just an alternative version of AAI Programmable Vehicles remote control?
It's much simpler. Basically, the RC is a selection tool that you can use to select vehicles in an area. When you've chosen at least one vehicle, you can choose a target position by clicking somewhere on the ground or map, and the vehicles will try to find a path to it.
Under the hood, Autodrive and AAI are completely different. AAI will make a duplicate version of each supported vehicle prototype and swap the vehicles when they are remote-controlled. Autodrive will use the original prototypes and make sure they have a minimal equipment grid that can hold just Autodrive's special equipment. (If a vehicle comes with its own natural equipment grid, the number of slots will be extended, and our equipment can be used along with the stuff that would normally go in there.)
The grid will hold sensors extending the functionality of Autodrive a particular vehicle will use: The gate sensor will make sure that a car can open/close gates, so it can pass into walled-off areas; the tank sensor will refill the vehicle's fuel from its own main inventory; the enemy sensor will refill ammo from the main inventory and let the vehicle fire on enemies …
Pathfinding works differently: AAI will insert a "navigator" (basically, a custom "unit" prototype, so it will use the biters' pathfinding algorithm), Autodrive will calculate its own paths -- which may take some time and is not always flawless. If necessary (for opening gates or shooting), it will insert a dummy character.
Some things don't work optimally yet: the logistic sensor has its flaws (I've an idea how to improve it, but no time yet to implement it), and the train sensor may put your vehicle in kamikaze mode instead of preventing it from taking damage. :-)
When I was still playing, I used Autodrive exclusively because it was much simpler than AAI. (The original author transferred mod ownership to me when he moved on from Factorio, so I wasn't biased towards my own mod at that time but was just a regular player.) Even if you don't want to do any fancy programming, it makes life so much easier: hop into a car, choose a destination, and let it drive there without worrying about crashing into stuff.
