A Self Driving (New) Year #2

Written by init_27 | Published 2018/01/11
Tech Story Tags: self-driving-cars | udacity | deep-learning | computer-vision | autonomous-cars

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

My 2018 Path to Learning.

You can find me on Twitter @bhutanisanyam1, connect with me on Linkedin here

This is Part 2 of the series.Here is the Part 1, go check it out to know what has been going on in my Garage!

Term 1 Cohort of my Self Driving Car Nanodegree classroom starts on the 19th, meanwhile I have started working on things in my Garage that I want to share:

2 Weeks in:

As Promised, I would add posts to the series regularly

Here is some news:I have decided to make a Mini Self Driving Car to apply what I will learn in my Self Driving Car Nanodegree Program:

  • The Setup: The Model 1 (Name TBD-Please help me pick a name in the comments below!) will be Raspberry Pi 3 based + RC Car setup.
  • Reason: Raspberry Pi 3 although has less horsepower (pun intended) to run all the Image Processing and detection tasks is a good place to test my skills as a primer and certainly later, I will apply the same to a Nvidia Jetson TX-2 (Or 1). The secondary reason being, I don’t own a Jetson and I will apply for Student aid options later.

Model 1 Chasis: The Chasis is 10 years old!

  • Progress: 1. I’ve found a RC Toy Car (from my childhood), that will function as the main chassis.2. Setup RPI3 board: I’ve installed Ubuntu Mate on the Raspberry Pi Board, configured ROS and OpenCV on it. 3. Setup the PiBoard for Remote Logins and running scripts on boot: which is essential, since in the field my Model 1 car should be able to boot up and drive right away!

Ubuntu Mate Setup

I have also taken the courage to set 5 bold targets before my Term 1 starts (Roughly a week from now):

  • Complete 2 Projects before the Term’s opening:I will attempt to make a crude solution to the Lane Detection & Sign Classification Projects, before the Nanodegree opens! (The Project Repositories are hosted on GitHub and I will attempt to solve it using knowledge and hints provided via them). Later, I’ll share a proper review once the Projects ‘Meet specifications’-which is Udacity’s codeword for saying Project Complete!

  • Deploy Lane Detection on Model 1 Mini SDC (Guys, please help me pick a name, this doesn’t sound cool at all). Since the Lane Detection pipeline is OpenCV based, I’ll test on the RPI board using the Pi Camera.

Pi Cam 2

Long Term functionality Goals for My Mini Self Driving Car:

  • Path (lane) following
  • Crash Avoidance
  • Object Detection
  • Symbol Detection
  • Bonus points: A drift mode!

Please note that these aren’t the Pre-requistes, rather are my own personal ventures to my Self Driving Year.

I will share detailed posts of the targets that I have completed.

Stay Tuned for updates! I will keep sharing my story, if I make it to the finish line with my Goals or hit the dust!

These series will also be a public accountability of how I have been working on my Journey and hence the title for the series ‘A Self Driving Year’

Subscribe to My Newsletter if you want a weekly-ish curated list of Deep Learning and Computer Vision articles.

You can find me on Twitter @bhutanisanyam1, connect with me on Linkedin here


Written by init_27 | 👨‍💻 H2Oai 🎙 CTDS.Show & CTDS.News 👨‍🎓 fast.ai 🎲 Kaggle 3x Expert
Published by HackerNoon on 2018/01/11