Carla Self-Driving Car Development

Team Composition

Eduardo Elael	[email protected]
Kunal Luharuwala	[email protected]
Ramesh S	[email protected]
Manish S	[email protected]
Chunan H	[email protected]

Development

The main challenge for this project was the "traffic light detection" we experimented with different approaches before settling.

• Yolov3: We trained Yolov3 with Bosch Small Traffic Lights Dataset, but even though we achieved high accuracy on the real images, it was falling very frequently within the simulation.
• SSD: We used manually collected data from the simulator to train an SSD network. At this point, we succeeded in inferring the traffic lights, but the neural network was taking too long to process the images. The delay and some miss classifications were making it hard for the car to stop correctly.
• SqueezeNet: We finally decided to experiment on directly classifying the images from the camera, as its position should mainly contain traffic lights. To help to improve the image processing, we scaled them down as a preprocessing step and selected a small network called SqueezeNet. We used the traffic_light topic as ground truth when collecting data, but set any traffic light state as unknown whenever it was too far.

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This is the project repo for the final project of the Udacity Self-Driving Car Nanodegree: Programming a Real Self-Driving Car. For more information about the project, see the project introduction here.

Please use one of the two installation options, either native or docker installation.

Native Installation

• Be sure that your workstation is running Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus or Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahir. Ubuntu downloads can be found here.

• If using a Virtual Machine to install Ubuntu, use the following configuration as minimum:

  • 2 CPU
  • 2 GB system memory
  • 25 GB of free hard drive space

  The Udacity provided virtual machine has ROS and Dataspeed DBW already installed, so you can skip the next two steps if you are using this.

• Follow these instructions to install ROS

  • ROS Kinetic if you have Ubuntu 16.04.
  • ROS Indigo if you have Ubuntu 14.04.

• Download the Udacity Simulator.

Docker Installation

Install Docker

Build the docker container

docker build . -t capstone

Run the docker file

docker run -p 4567:4567 -v $PWD:/capstone -v /tmp/log:/root/.ros/ --rm -it capstone

Port Forwarding

To set up port forwarding, please refer to the "uWebSocketIO Starter Guide" found in the classroom (see Extended Kalman Filter Project lesson).

Usage

1. Clone the project repository

git clone https://github.com/udacity/CarND-Capstone.git

2. Install python dependencies

cd CarND-Capstone
pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Make and run styx

cd ros
catkin_make
source devel/setup.sh
roslaunch launch/styx.launch

4. Run the simulator

Real world testing

1. Download training bag that was recorded on the Udacity self-driving car.
2. Unzip the file

unzip traffic_light_bag_file.zip

3. Play the bag file

rosbag play -l traffic_light_bag_file/traffic_light_training.bag

4. Launch your project in site mode

cd CarND-Capstone/ros
roslaunch launch/site.launch

5. Confirm that traffic light detection works on real life images

Other library/driver information

Outside of requirements.txt, here is information on other driver/library versions used in the simulator and Carla:

Specific to these libraries, the simulator grader and Carla use the following:

	Simulator	Carla
Nvidia driver	384.130	384.130
CUDA	8.0.61	8.0.61
cuDNN	6.0.21	6.0.21
TensorRT	N/A	N/A
OpenCV	3.2.0-dev	2.4.8
OpenMP	N/A	N/A

We are working on a fix to line up the OpenCV versions between the two.