This Week In Autonomous Vehicles — July 23rd Edition

Last week was a very interesting week for me in terms of Autonomous Vehicles. To start off, I ditched my old H2 RC Car because of the Front Axle issue which I toiled weeks trying to replace. It being a Made In China, you understand the problems I was working on. I got a new smaller Ferari RC to work with,… with minimal delays. All this is part of my building blocks to become a Self Driving car engineer in the near future. On the software side, am done with Project 2 of the Udacity Self Driving Car Nano Degree Ptogramme where I learn from students who were in the course before from their past assignments. I love what am learning.

Voyage — Check Them Out

I dont think there is a company that has shared alot of info about what they are working on like Voyage. Please see their account here. I have been reading their articles about the CAN Bus and am impressed. They really go into details and the images are also awesome.
Bogdan Djukic — Build your own self driving (toy) car
Bogdan Djukic has a great tut on how to build your own self driving toy car. You can drop there and have a look at what he is doing. Here is an excerpt :

We’ll take Deep Neural Network described in my Behavior Cloning project from Udacity Self Driving Car nano degree course and run it on a remote controlled (RC) race car using Robotic Operating System (ROS) as a middle-ware. The end goal is to enable robot to autonomously complete the racing track
What really fascinated me was how he used Robot Operating System (ROS) in his project. I was very interested, so I looked for it….
Installing Robot Operating System (ROS) on Archlinux

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications. From drivers to state-of-the-art algorithms, and with powerful developer tools, ROS has what you need for your next robotics project. And it’s all open source.

Pierre KILLY has a great article about Installing ROS on Archlinux. He is very clear and I must say something that I think he forgot to mention, the process is so long. I waited it overnight and even by morning it was not over. My machine is a Dell i5 4GB RAM. So if you have a distro like mine, you can install ROS and give it a shot. I will post screenshots during this week of my progress. Thanks Pierre.
Notes on Building a Self-Driving Car — Todd Gore

For those ones who gave graduated from messing with the RC cars, you can read Tedd Gore article on how t build a real Self Driving Car. He has several warnings up ahead before the project takes off because messing up with your car can put you in danger. So yeah, be careful and if you really want to do this, enroll at Udacity before lifting that screwdriver.
So that’s all that happened last week guys, have a good Autonomous Driving Week and remember, check your code before letting go of the steering wheel :-) Be safe out there and stay creative. Circuit Open []
