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by ciumonk 4431 days ago
Made an autonomous vehicle out of a VW Golf/Rabbit, in around 2 weeks.

Custom built hardware, including the actuators.

Custom built RTOS on micro nodes.

Driving via openCV, hough transforms for lane detection, stereovision and flows for obstacles, surf/etc for traffic signs(don't ask, I was learning)on a stack of 2 laptops connected via gigabit ethernet.

Nicest thing: I got the models trained mainly without moving the car, by pumping the framebuffer of two racing/car games, rFactor and GTA3 through glcs to openCV and controlling the games via uinput to make a virtual city to drive in.

Don't have a lot of pics, here's some HW:

http://imgur.com/9cfzbMv ( yes, that's an old cordless drill and an angle grinder head with a bespoke bike chain :) )

http://imgur.com/5x9T9gi (piston is weirdly offset so I could still put my foot on the brake in emergencies, like that one time i smashed it into a fence...)

http://imgur.com/Ig7MaLT (notice how I kept the costs down to almost nothing, in this case the air distributor for the brakes made with Meccano and old air valves and a geared motor, since I didn't have the funds to buy anything)

1 comments

This is awesome. That would be so cool if you described the entire process in a blog post :)
That's exactly what I'm thinking, but it will take 1-2 months, right now I'm 1400 km away from that stuff.. Stay tuned, I guess.