Looking Into The Future

Yesterday, Michael and I had the final demo & presentation of our autonomous golf cart. Phase 1 of the development process is now completed, which means a couple of different things for us:

• For the rest of this trimester, we will no longer be developing the goal cart.
• We will continue the phase 2 of the development process in the Spring.
• We finished most of the basic hardware & software development.
• The project is now open source on Github!

About the open source project

Since the very beginning of our journey, we have always wanted to make our work an open source project. Michael and I were deeply inspired by some of the wonderful projects on the Github, and we have received invaluable advice from some of the creators of those projects. The Github community and beyond could take our work further. At this point, we believe that our software and hardware are ready for the open source community.

What’s next

“Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking about”

— Winston Churchill

Our work is far from over. And yes, I can not go a day without thinking about this project. In phase 2 of the development process, we will try to make all of our technologies more reliable, namely, the autonomous steering system. Here are a few things we will do:

1. Collect our own data
2. Improve the network architecture and train the network on our own dataset.
3. Install more camera sensors
4. Improve the steering hardware to increase reliability and precision.
5. Integrate the GPS system for global path planning
6. … and more

Of course, I will keep all of you up to date on our progress.

My gratitude

Last but not least, I just want to express my deepest appreciations for

Peter Nilsson

Emily Richardson

Megan Hayes-Golding 

Their help and support during the project made this special journey possible.

Finally, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions, comments or concerns.

Email | Project on Github

Further Reading

If you are here already, why not check out of some my other posts. Thanks!

• Deep learning steering prediction
  1. Visualizing the Steering Model with Attention Maps
  2. Successfully Tested the Autonomous Steering System for the Self-Driving Golf Cart
  3. Predicting Steering Angle with Deep Learning — Part 2
  4. Predicting Steering Angle with Deep Learning — Part 1
• Semantic segmentation
  1. The Robustness of the Semantic Segmentation Network
  2. Autonomous Cruise Control System
  3. Understanding the World Through Semantic Segmentation
• Driver by wire system (DBW)
  1. Hacking the Accelerator — Controlling the Speed Using an Arduino
  2. Steering Motor Control System (SMCS)
  3. The Steering Hardware Works!
  4. Engineering the Steering Mechanism