M2M Day 187: Two hours later, and my computer still isn’t cooperating
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For May, my goal is to build the software part of a self-driving car.
Yesterday, I realized that I needed to shift my focus and devote my efforts to building some version of the Magic Function, which is the mathematical algorithm that maps input images of the road into explicit driving/steering instructions for the self-driving car.
Today, I found a 223GB dataset that was open-sourced by Udacity (a company that makes online courses about technical topics, including self-driving cars), which contains exactly what I need:
Udacity took a video from a dash cam, broke it down into individual frames, and then labelled each frame with the corresponding steering angle that the human driver was actually executing.
For example, frame: 1479425444933328937; steering angle: -0.346924703940749
As a result, this dataset is perfect to create and test the Magic Function — I can ask the Magic Function to guess the steering angle based on the frame of video, and then I can compare the guess to the actual recorded steering angle.
If the guess is far from the actual value, I can update the function and retest it. Theoretically, I can then use the computer to help me iterate on this process thousands of times, and eventually find a reasonable way to accurately steer the car.
Since I only “theoretically” know how to do this right now, I returned to Github today to see if I could find anyone making use of Udacity’s dataset in this way.
I found a few projects, and hoped that I could get them up and running fairly quickly. After about two hours of trying though, I continued to get fatal errors in Terminal — not even from running the code, but just from trying to set up my computer with the libraries needed to run the code in the first place.
A few days ago, I made it seem like whenever Terminal throws an error, it’s trivially easy to just Google the answer and proceed forward. While this was my experience a few days ago, this experience probably isn’t the norm, and it certainly wasn’t today.
So despite all my efforts, I effectively made zero progress today, which is frustrating but also part of the game.
Tomorrow, I will continue to play this game and see if I can get my computer to cooperate. For now, I’ll remain hopeful…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
