Book Image

Hands-On Vision and Behavior for Self-Driving Cars

By : Luca Venturi, Krishtof Korda
Book Image

Hands-On Vision and Behavior for Self-Driving Cars

By: Luca Venturi, Krishtof Korda

Overview of this book

The visual perception capabilities of a self-driving car are powered by computer vision. The work relating to self-driving cars can be broadly classified into three components - robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. This book provides existing computer vision engineers and developers with the unique opportunity to be associated with this booming field. You will learn about computer vision, deep learning, and depth perception applied to driverless cars. The book provides a structured and thorough introduction, as making a real self-driving car is a huge cross-functional effort. As you progress, you will cover relevant cases with working code, before going on to understand how to use OpenCV, TensorFlow and Keras to analyze video streaming from car cameras. Later, you will learn how to interpret and make the most of lidars (light detection and ranging) to identify obstacles and localize your position. You’ll even be able to tackle core challenges in self-driving cars such as finding lanes, detecting pedestrian and crossing lights, performing semantic segmentation, and writing a PID controller. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to write code for a self-driving car running in a driverless car simulator, and be able to tackle various challenges faced by autonomous car engineers.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: OpenCV and Sensors and Signals
5
Section 2: Improving How the Self-Driving Car Works with Deep Learning and Neural Networks
12
Section 3: Mapping and Controls

Integrating the neural network with Carla

We will now integrate our neural network with Carla, to achieve self-driving.

As before, we start by making a copy of manual_control.py, which we could call manual_control_drive.py. For simplicity, I will only write the code that you need to change or add, but you can find the full source code on GitHub.

Please remember that this file should run in the PythonAPI/examples directory.

In principle, letting our neural network take control of the steering wheel is quite simple, as we just need to analyze the current frame and set the steering. However, we also need to apply some throttle, or the car will not move!

It's also very important that you run the inference phase in the game loop, or that you are really sure that it is running on the client, else the performance will drop substantially and your network will have a hard time driving due to the excess of latency between receiving the frame and sending the instruction to drive...