3 outstanding projects from Udacity students
This week, we feature Gustavo Cevallos, Hirza Pimentel, and Blanca Sanchez, from our Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree program!
At Udacity, we embrace a project-based approach to learning. Our programs are designed to provide hands-on experience with new tools and technologies, so that you can start applying what you’ve learned right away. This focus on practical applicability is what helps set Udacity alumni apart — when you graduate, you do so armed with a portfolio of completed projects that clearly demonstrate your expertise. In today’s hiring landscape, companies are desperate for qualified talent, and they can’t afford to guess. Udacity grads stand out, not just for what they’re capable of accomplishing, but for what they’ve already accomplished.
It’s both a pleasure and an honor to feature the work our students are engaged in, and today, we’d like to share projects completed by three students from our Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree program: Gustavo Cevallos, Hirza Pimentel, and Blanca Sanchez.
We’ll show you examples of the work these students have done, and hear from David Silver, Udacity’s Program Lead for our Self-Driving Car programs, about what makes these projects so impressive!
Gustavo Cevallos
First, let’s take a look at a project by Gustavo Cevallos. “The Joy Ride” project challenges students to apply their knowledge of Python and object-oriented programming to write the controls for a simulated car. Students have to manipulate the gas, brake, and steering components. Then, they must control the car to complete a drag race, and a drive around a circular track. Finally, as we can see in Gustavo’s video below, they have to manage a tricky parallel parking maneuver.
Here’s what David Silver, Udacity’s Self-Driving Car lead, had to say about Gustavo’s work:
“Gustavo’s implementation is particularly good because he is able to move his vehicle into the parking space with a single maneuver, instead of a multi-point turn. Additionally, Gustavo’s vehicle is perfectly spaced and aligned with the other parked cars.”
Hirza Pimentel
Next, we have Hirza Pimentel’s “Traffic Light Classifier” project. This project has students put their knowledge of computer vision techniques to work, to build a model that accurately classifies images of traffic lights as red, yellow, or green. In the project, students classify images and reprocess data until their model achieves over 90 percent accuracy.
David Silver explains why Hirza’s work on this project was so important for developing her understanding of computer vision:
“The Traffic Light Classifier Project is an example of how amazing computer vision is, and how quickly students can apply it to real-world problems. Within weeks of first learning how to work with images, Hirza was already building a program to perform a critical self-driving task.”
Blanca Sanchez
Third up, we have Blanca Sanchez’s project, “Translate Python to C++.” The goal of this project is for students to take a 2D histogram filter written in Python, translate it into C++, then optimize it. A histogram filter is a mathematical technique for combining data together. Histogram filters are particularly useful for merging together data from multiple sensors on an autonomous vehicle.
You can see Blanca’s approach below, with before and after pictures of the conversion to C++.
Here is David Silver again, on why it’s so important to understand C++:
“C++ is a crucial language for self-driving car engineers, because code that runs on the vehicle must be fast. C++ is a compiled, high-performance language that runs quickly and handles data from many different sensors.”
Thanks to all of the students for allowing us to share their amazing projects! Stay tuned for our next project post, where we’ll be featuring more of the incredible projects our students have built.
