This document provides instructions for building a basic autonomous vehicle using a Raspberry Pi, camera, and small RC car. It involves the following steps: 1) Assembling the hardware, which includes attaching a $25 camera and Raspberry Pi to the RC car. 2) Setting up the software, which uses machine learning to train a model to map images from the camera to motor and servo outputs. 3) Testing and refining the autonomous driving capabilities by having the car capture images, run predictions on the trained model to determine controls, and iteratively improving its performance over time.

1. Building your first
autonomous car
@heri
Tip: check studiozenkai.com for article

2. Background
• Machine Learning experience limited to one course in
Msc
• Experience mostly in web applications
• No experience in electronics
• Not looking to write a Deep Learning paper - just a
current interest in autonomous robotics and practical AI.
Example: how feasible is it to make an autonomous
vehicle or drone? Can I build a fleet of robocars that work
together on a task?

3. Typical Autonomous Car Architecture
It’s complex and expensive!

5. And probably has more lines of code than a
SpaceX rocket, with a computer hot enough to
toast your apartment in January!

7. 1 $25 camera, 1 Raspberry Pi (A, B, B+), and a small
RC car, plus various <$15 electronic parts
2 hours hardware assembly
6 hours software setup
A few days to drive, train, tweak, and test

8. Original Wiring for RC car

9. With a Raspberry Pi

11. Machine Learning
• Same process as computational
photography on your smartphone
• Step 1 : capture image
• Step 2 : annotate image with motor & servo
output
• Step 3 & 4 on external PC: train model
• Step 5 back on Raspberry Pi : capture
image
• Step 6 on Pi : predict motor & servo output
• End-to-end approach. A supervised ML
model is trained to directly predict the motor
outputs from the original picture, without
passing through an intermediate
representation of vehicle speed or position
• Implementation of “Deep Learning for Self-
Driving Cars” by Nvidia team, Aug 2016

12. Demo

13. Next
• Add more sensors and more
actuators
• Use OpenCV/OpenMV
• Others on Github: RyanZotti,
Udacity, Apollo (biggest open
source project, a standard in
China) etc.
• Comma.AI
• Autonomous drones?

14. #Montreal
• Questions?
• The more, the merrier. Can’t have a race with just a
couple of people
• Community space? Track? Costs?
• Next Meetup : Meet & Work on your prototype. Foulab
has electronics and gear.