Existing Open Source Platforms

There is already a number of great open source platforms, like Baidu’s Apollo, or Autoware 2.0.

Better simulators like CARLA, or Baidu’s Dreamland.

Amazing datasets, like KITTI, Cityscapes, and most recently and perhaps notably Berkly’s DeepDrive.

However the scale and complexity of these platforms and datasets can be somewhat daunting for anyone who is working on them outside of a team or University setting.

If it is not yet evident, I speak from personal experience on most of the above points. I have a pretty good grasp of the perception module from Baidu’s Apollo and already had several Pull Requests accepted.

But I want to do more!

Therefore, once again, this is an open call for all those interested in becoming Self-Driving Car Engineers to come together and build an open source platform for self-driving cars using easily obtainable consumer grade hardware.

“Consumer grade” here does not mean this platform will drive your actual car. It does however mean that we should be able to get real hands-on experience with many of the tasks of self-driving.

For example: the control module in a self-driving car typically models vehicle dynamics with a PID controller to actuate steering, acceleration and braking based on inputs from the planning and perception modules.

You can only claim to understand these concepts after you’ve implemented and tested them on something that has actual tire treads, on a bumpy street, going downhill, in the rain— i.e. not a simulator nor a differential drive robot moving around your living room.

Similarly you cannot truly appreciate the difficulty of perception until you’ve taken your cameras outside in bright sunlight or on a rainy day — or in the snow!

These are things you just can’t do with a simple robot chassis from Amazon!

And since most of us cannot afford to acquire the hardware necessary to run the Baidu Apollo platform, or the Nvidia DriveWorks or any of the other “open source” platforms, we need an alternative — and not a simulator.

Luckily this can be “mostly” achieved with any Go-Kart, Peddle-Car, Golf-Kart or similar vehicle that satisfies the following properties: