Not very far 😫! I have two approaches.

Not very far 😫! I have two approaches.

One is to use an existing opensource tool, ie openpilot from the comma.ai team and get it working. It doesn’t work with my car because it requires I know all the commands my car uses. Knowing the commands requires some reverse engineering. I haven’t spent enough time on it. The comma.ai team has released a hardware product called the Panda which helps this process. I am still waiting for mine to ship. Once it comes, I should be able to add support for my car. Openpilot runs on just a OnePlus 3T phone, training happens on the Cloud. Their business model will be ~$20/month to use their service or some blockchain based ICO. Honestly, I am not sure how well it will work. Most; if not all; self-drving tech is being developed in countries where they have Right-hand traffic. And because the tech is data driven, things can go very wrong in Left-hand traffic countries. Although I am told that the data is tagged by country and it might not be a huge problem.

The other way is my self-made system using deep learning. The system uses Xiaomi’s Dashboard Camera to record video, a radar from Delphi to sense front obstacles, a OBD2 sensor which gives metadata of car (i.e. speed, fuel, traction on wheels, wiper state, steering angle etc. its readonly) and deep learning tools primarily inspired from the Udacity Self-Driving course. Training ie video analysis happens offline and when I am in my car I connect my MacBook with my car using the ODB2 port and send messages(read/write). I have been able to reverse-engineer braking and acceleration signals so can control only those aspects as of now. Still haven’t been able to crack the steering codes. I am hoping the 🐼 will help me!

I test the system on couple of RC cars which work okayish. They work over WIFI, in the real world, the latency in WIFI communication will result in a roadkill 😱.

Production (real traffic) however is a very different game. I won’t let it control everything until I am 1000% sure that it works perfectly 😝. Hopefully before the year ends!