October 22, 2017

Donkey: Building Self Driving Cars with Will Roscoe

33 minutes

Summary

Do you wish that you had a self-driving car of your own? With Donkey you can make that dream a reality. This week Will Roscoe shares the story of how he got involved in the arena of self-driving car hobbyists and ended up building a Python library to act as his pilot. We talked about the hardware involved, how he has evolved the code to meet unexpected challenges, and how he plans to improve it in the future. So go build your own self driving car and take it for a spin!

Preface

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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Will Roscoe about Donkey, a python library for building DIY self driving cars.

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

What is Donkey and what was your reason for creating it?

What is the story behind the name?

What was your reason for choosing Python as the language for implementing Donkey and if you were to start over today would you make the same choice?

How is Donkey implemented and how has its software architecture evolved?

Is the library built in a way that you can process inputs from additional sensor types, such as proximity detectors or LIDAR?

For training the autopilot what are the input features that the model is testing against for the input data, and is it possible to change the features that it will try to detect?

Do you have plans to incorporate any negative reinforcement techniques for training the pilot models so that errors in data collection can be identified as undesirable outcomes?

What have been some of the most interesting or humorous successes and failures while testing your cars?

What are some of the challenges involved with getting such a sophisticated stack of software running on a Raspberry Pi?

What are some of the improvements or new features that you have planned for the future of Donkey?

Media

Donkey Car Photos

Keep In Touch

Donkey Slack Channel

Wills Twitter – @dataduce

#donkeycar on social

Picks

Tobias

Orgzly

Org Mode for Sublime

Org Mode for VSCode

Org Mode for Vim

Will

Algorithms to Live By

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

A song I can’t stop nodding my head to

Links

Donkey Car

DIY Robocars

Tornado

[Tornado on Podcast.init](https://www.pythonpodcast.com/episode-40-ben-darnell-on-tornado/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

Raspberry Pi

TensorFlow

Convolutional Neural Network

Adafruit

LIDAR

ROS (Robot Operating System)

Unity

Udacity self driving car nano-degree

SparkFun

Beagleboard

Adam Conway

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

...more

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By Tobias Macey

4.4

100100 ratings