You’ve probably heard about big name self driving car companies like Tesla with Autopilot, Google’s Waymo, Cruise Automation, and even Uber who has been working on their own autonomous vehicle. Most of these companies achieve their goal of autonomy using bulky and expensive sensors and their solutions are impractical for the everyday commuter. These systems are very limited in quantity, only work on very specific vehicles, and are for the most part—not available for the average consumer.

Waymo self driving car (photo provided by Waymo)

One lessor talked about company, Comma.ai, is taking a different approach to self driving cars by supplying affordable hardware and open source software for users and developers to utilize. Comma’s overall goal is to bring self driving tech to the general public by condensing the required hardware and writing easy to use software to support a variety of cars.

How Comma’s Self Driving System Works

Comma’s open source driving software, OpenPilot, utilizes hardware already included in modern vehicles such as radar and the vehicles electric power steering module to limit costs and simplify installation of their own hardware. This allows OpenPilot to be deployed on a number of cars out of the box without any expensive parts or complicated setup processes.

OpenPilot running on an EON sees the world through a number of different platforms (vision, radar, gps) and makes calculated decisions based on new and past data. OpenPilot uses these decisions to tell the car how to react in a given situation. If OpenPilot detects a curve in the road it will send signals via CAN (a messaging network that allows onboard devices to communicate) to turn the wheel and follow the bend while maintaining a safe distance from the leading car using the onboard radar.

Route prediction visualization utilizing data from HD maps and Grey Panda GPS

Since it is open sourced, OpenPilot is always improving. The Comma.ai team as well as community are working hard developing ports for currently unsupported cars, and newly supported cars are popping up at exponential rates. The community driven environment makes support for the Comma.ai system a breeze, reaching out to experienced users on Slack or the community forum will yield extensive help and support.

Let’s Talk About Hardware

First, it’s important to check that you indeed have a supported car unless you plan on getting your hands dirty porting your own car (if that’s the case you can find a great guide here). To know if your car is supported check the list of supported car’s in the read me section of the OpenPilot GitHub.

To get started a few products from Comma.ai are required.

Cars have many CAN buses not exposed on the main OBD-II connector. giraffe is an adapter board that gets you in.

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Panda is the nicest universal car interface ever. It allows you full access to the many communication buses of your car. Grey panda includes GPS.

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The EON is the brains of the system, once loaded with OpenPilot this will be the device providing the processing power to make driving decisions.