Self-Driving Car Engineer Diary — 13
Tue, 24/Oct/2017 — Final diary entry.
Capstone Project
At the end of the course (Term 3, month 3) we covered vehicle architecture and ROS. This System Integration was then applied to the capstone project — Programming A Real Self-Driving Car (‘Carla’).
Team Work
I joined the distributed RoboFolks team - evotianusx / Rohit Patil (Perception), An Nguyen (Planning / team lead) and myself and qiang lu (Control / documentation). Half of the capstone requirement was to successfully work in a Team (Technology being the other half) as the project was too large for most students to do alone. The internets 2 best tools (Slack and Github) formed our collaboration platform and the team poured many hours (especially from An) into it.
Key Challenges
Environments (VM vs Local installs, failing computers and access to only 1 high-performance test machine), critical family / urgent work commitments, climbing the learning curve and iterative design / trouble-shooting. Clear communication (and keeping a sense of humour while under pressure) were vital as we all adapted to each new challenge.
Design and Testing
Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Retrospective
A colossal learning experience in every way! Nearly 12 months of effort has raised my skills 10-fold.
This is the direct result of committed Udacity staff, with their depth of knowledge, experience and teaching skills (Sebastian Thrun, Ryan Keenan, David Silver, etc), the use of engaging simulators in challenging real-world projects, and the incredible community of unselfish students helping each other in the Slack channels.
