Hello!
We have been hard at work to create (to our knowledge) the world’s first fully online learning self-driving mini-car!
Using a stock RC car model, we equipped it with a Raspberry Pi 3 along with an Arduino to control the servos/speed controller. We used the latest iteration of our online learning software, EOgmaNeo, to provide the brains of the car.
All inference and learning is done right on the Raspberry Pi’s CPU, no pre-training, no connection to a more powerful machine. The car uses a PiCamera to provide visual inputs and a steam controller to provide steering targets when in training mode.
The model is able to run in real-time with ~10 million synapses at 60 frames per second on the Pi.
Stay tuned for more information and a source code release!
Here is a video of the car in action!
Hi Eric,
I am impressed of the self-driving toycar. I’m going to build a similar one with an old RC car (my son’s toy many years ago), but will use some pretraining data from DroNet (http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/dronet.html).
Is your source code available from github ? I don’t see it, maybe I miss it. May i have a copy for my personal use? I will use RPi3 with a Pi camera. Seems RPi3 cpu is fast enough to do the learning & inference in real time.
What ML engine do you use ?
What RL algorithm do you use ?
Any comments or suggestions for me ? I got this idea a few days ago & started purchasing parts. The Pi camera is still on shipping. 🙂
Your help or suggestion would help a lot of my father & son’s project.
Thanks -Kit
Hello!
The source code for the library itself is available here. It is free for non-commercial use.
It shouldn’t be necessary to pre-train it – especially since the camera perspective is very different in that data from what a small car would actually see.
We don’t use any – as I like to call it – “backpropagation libraries”, since our algorithm doesn’t use any backpropagation. Our algorithm is written from scratch in C++ with bindings to Python, Java, and C#.
Self-driving is a supervised learning task, so we don’t use any RL.
If you like, you can come to our Gitter chat room – we can answer any additional questions you have there!
Thanks for the quick & detail reply, and invite to the chat room. Would be an exciting place to learn more.
Thanks 🙂
Hello sir, I am a student of computer science and I am in my final semester. I want to take your Self Driving car project as my Final Year Project. Can I use it for that purpose please tell me.
Sure, the software is free for non-commercial use!