jakhax / sonic-the-self-driving-car

my attempt at self driving cars, first a self driving RC car

Sonic the self driving car

• Building a raspberry pi self driving rc car, may take a while, but i hope to learn a lot of stuff on the way.

Work Done this weekend

• Create a handler to control sonic with a PS3 bluetooth controller(see donkey car ps3 controller).
• Use tornado to create a controller stream for sonic.
• Stream video from sonic's pi cam to the web interface.
• create PWM actuators for controlling sonic i.e steering the MG996R servo motor and throttling the DC motor via L298N motor board with speed control.
• Succesfully drive sonic via the web interface with the pi cam.
• Self driving stub and CNN model.

Future works

• House cleaning and committing lots of changes.
• Nvidia's research paper on self driving cars.

Usage

Parts

• A part is a class that represents a functional unit of the car (physical or logical) such as cameras, web interface and motor contollers.

Anatomy of a part

• All parts share a common structure so that they can all be run by the vehicles drive loop.
  • part.run: function that runs the part
  • part.update: funtion that runs the part in a thread loop
  • part.run_threaded : threaded function
  • part.shutdown
• For a vehicle to perform well the drive loop must execute 10-30 times per second so slow parts should be threaded to avoid holding up the drive loop.
• A threaded part needs to define the function that runs in the separate thread and the function to call that will return the most recent values quickly.

List of current parts

• Pi camera
• Web interface
• PWM Actuators - MG996R servo motor and L298N to control the 12v DC motor
• Joystick - am using an X-box 360 pad , the controls for the PS3 dualshock were difficult to use in my case( R2 for steering !!)
• Tub - datastrore to store sensor data in a key, value format e.g speed,steering angle & images from the pi cam.

Contribution

• Right now you can contribute by giving me ideas on how you think the neural network for the self driving car should be designed & necessary hardware too.

Resources

• The donkey car project has been really helpful to me, Note, though most of the design of this project is similar, It's not a donkey car project.
• Nvidia End to End learning for self driving cars https://images.nvidia.com/content/tegra/automotive/images/2016/solutions/pdf/end-to-end-dl-using-px.pdf
• https://towardsdatascience.com/deep-learning-for-self-driving-cars-7f198ef4cfa2
• Comma AI research https://github.com/commaai/research
• https://github.com/cyanamous/Self-Driving-Car-