Self-Driving Car Engineer Diary — 2

Sun, 18/Dec/2016

Hi. Week 1 of 1st term has finished and project 1 submitted. Here are some of the highlights so far …

1. Course videos and interactive quizzes where slick and engaging. The Great Robot Race documentary was fascinating and really helped set the context for the current world boom in autonomous-everything! Worth watching and shows how an intuitive solution to a complex problem beat lots of money and resources being thrown at the issue.
2. Andrew Gray popped into our student ‘ama’ Slack channel for a 30 minute Q&A. Students were asking a lot about future job opportunities in this new Self-Driving vehicle industry. Some were concerned with the rapid rate of improvement and that by the time we graduate (Sep/2017 for my Dec/2016 co-hort) that we might have missed the best opportunities. Andrew highlighted the fact many existing companies outside of Self-Driving cars and trucks are actively pursuing combined AI / Robotics strategies and completing this intensive 9 month training readies us for this new industry.
3. Project 1 : Finding Lane Lines. We jumped straight into Computer Vision with region masking, canny edge detection and hough transformations. These detected then transformed road lane lines (y = mx +b) from ‘line space’ (x,y axis) to ‘hough space’ (b,m axis). Applying CV2 and Numpy libraries were were able to project (‘mutate’) red line lane guides onto the road seen in the driving videos.