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

Why do you need controls?

This may seem completely obvious since you are trying to build a self-driving car, but let's cover it quickly.

When you build a self-driving car, what are you trying to achieve? The ultimate goal is to get the vehicle to move from a start position to a destination by commanding actuators such as the steering, throttle, and brakes. Historically, the commands to these actuators have been provided by you, the human driver, via the steering wheel, and the throttle and brake pedals. Now you are trying to remove yourself as the thing responsible for primary driving tasks. So, what do you put in place of yourself? A controller!

What is a controller?

A controller is simply an algorithm that takes some type of error signal and transforms it into an actuation signal to achieve a desired setpoint for a given process. Let's define some of these terms as follows:

  • The Control Variable (CV) or process variable is the variable that you would like...