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Udacity Self-Driving Car Nanodegree

Final Capstone Project: Programming a Real Self-Driving Car

presented by:

Team Knight Riders' KITT

* Feng Wang -- fwa785@gmail.com

* Maria Cristina An -- jingle1216@yahoo.com

* Carlos Barredo -- ccbaes@yahoo.es

* Stavros Dimopoulos -- sdim@sdim.gr

* Venkata Ramesh Gudapati -- venkataramesh@gmail.com

Project Overview

This final project is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program. It is summarized into the following phases:

  1. Building the Team
  2. Project Description
  3. Project Construction
  4. Directions for Use

Building the Team

The team members are part of the November 2018 cohort, most of which have an engineering or robotics background. The tasks for the project were divided by nodes except for the classifier where everyone took part in acquiring and annotating data, testing models and consolidating a run successfully. Communication was through a group Slack channel and the team created its own repository under it's team leader's account. The KITT Github repository can be found here.

Project Description

Model

The goal of the project is to write a code that will drive the car around a road track in a simulation after which the same code will be applied to drive a real car Carla around a real-life track. The project's code was structured using ROS packages wrapped in a Catkin workspace, written in Python and C++. The team members have the option to choose which environment to install and work their project on: Docker, AWS, VM and the Udacity Workspace were the preferred containers. Data was also shared via the FTP server. Work was done in phases as described below.

Classifier

The team used Google's Tensorflow Object Detection API for its classifier framework and have tested on multiple models before arriving at their final choice: the Single Shot MultiBox Detector with the Inception Neural Network v2 trained on the Coco dataset 2018 01 28.

Training

Training was done on two separate annotated datasets taken online. The first dataset contains simulator images that was fed to the model to create the first inference graph for running the classifier in the simulator. The training took 2,970 steps. The second dataset contains real-life images mixed with Carla ROS bag images for running on Carla and it took 3,900 steps. The final frozen graph of the model can be found here

Project Construction

Timeline

To complete the tasks on time, the KITT team has followed a schedule as well as the order of project development suggested in the classroom.

Bottlenecks

  • The first issue faced by the team was on which model to use for the project. Speed versus accuracy were the usual factors considered. Nevertheless, latency became a major determinant since the car would not run because of it. The models that were tried on were the Faster RCNN, SSD Resnet and SSD Inception. The latter became the best choice for its low computational overhead.

  • The traffic light images for simulator and real life were extracted from rosbag file captured for both simulator and the real life site images. The images were labeled by LabelImg. Some annotated data was found online to add on to the training data, both for the sim images and the site images.

  • A major hurdle for everyone was in setting up the environment for the project. A significant proportion of the time was spent on getting the project to run in the one environment, only to change to another because of high latency or non-workable errors. Some team members actually had to downgrade the systems they were using to meet the code requirements for Carla.

  • Building the classifier was the last difficulty for the team. Trial and error were done every step of the way. The buildup phases were as follows:

    • classifying red light, no red light using sim images
    • classifying according to state/colors
    • overcoming the car's sluggish motion with the addition of color classifier
    • classifying with real-life images
    • overcoming latency
    • downgrading to meet Carla requirements

The final draft now runs on Tensorflow-GPU 1.3 with CUDA 8.0 with two inference graphs for running in both the simulator and Carla's system.

Directions For Use

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

  • Dataspeed DBW

  • 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 instructions from term 2

Usage

  1. Clone the project repository
git clone https://github.com/fwa785/CarND-Capstone.git

  1. Copy the frozen graph files Get the frozen graph files from gdrive location, and copy the files to ros/src/tl_detector directory

  2. Install python dependencies

cd CarND-Capstone
pip install -r requirements.txt
  1. Make and run styx
cd ros
catkin_make
source devel/setup.sh
roslaunch launch/styx.launch
  1. 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
  1. Play the bag file
rosbag play -l traffic_light_bag_file/traffic_light_training.bag
  1. Launch your project in site mode
cd CarND-Capstone/ros
roslaunch launch/site.launch
  1. Confirm that traffic light detection works on real life images