What is a self-driving car engineer? πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» 🧠 πŸš™

It's not a single job description - there are many roles in a self-driving project!

🧠 Machine Learning
πŸ‘€ Computer Vision
πŸ’½ Big Data
πŸ•ΉοΈ Simulation
βœ… Test and Validation
🦺 Safety
πŸ’» Software Development

Read more below πŸ‘‡
🧠 Machine Learning Engineer
πŸ‘€ Computer Vision Engineer
πŸ’½ Big Data Engineer
πŸ•ΉοΈ Simulation Engineer
βœ… Test and Validation Engineer
πŸ’» Software Engineer
🦺 Safety Engineer
If you want to become a self-driving car engineer try to find a role that best fits your current skill set and you have a good chance! πŸ‘πŸ˜€

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More from @haltakov

21 Apr
Computer vision for self-driving cars 🧠 πŸš™

There are different computer vision problems you need to solve in a self-driving car.

β–ͺ️ Object detection
β–ͺ️ Lane detection
β–ͺ️ Drivable space detection
β–ͺ️ Semantic segmentation
β–ͺ️ Depth estimation
β–ͺ️ Visual odometry

Details πŸ‘‡
Object Detection πŸš—πŸšΆβ€β™‚οΈπŸš¦πŸ›‘

One of the most fundamental tasks - we need to know where other cars and people are, what signs, traffic lights and road markings need to be considered. Objects are identified by 2D or 3D bounding boxes.

Relevant methods: R-CNN, Fast(er) R-CNN, YOLO
Distance Estimation πŸ“

After you know what objects are present and where they are in the image, you need to know where they are in the 3D world.

Since the camera is a 2D sensor you need to first estimate the distance to the objects.

Relevant methods: Kalman Filter, Deep SORT
Read 11 tweets
20 Apr
Interesting results from the small experiment... πŸ˜„

This was actually a study reported in a Nature paper. Most people offer additive solutions (adding bricks) instead of substractive solutions (removing the pillar).

More details πŸ‘‡

In this example, the most elegant solution is to remove the pillar completely and let the roof lie on the block. It will be simpler, more stable and won't cost anything.

Some people quickly dismiss this option assuming this is not allowed, but it actualy is πŸ˜ƒ
This isn't because people don't recognize the value, but because many don't consider the substractive solution at all. Me included πŸ™‹β€β™‚οΈ

The paper shows that this happens a lot in real life, especially in regulation. People tend to add new rules, instead of removing old ones.
Read 5 tweets
20 Apr
Sensors for self-driving cars πŸŽ₯ 🧠 πŸš™

There are 3 main sensors types used in self-driving cars for environment perception:
β–ͺ️ Camera
β–ͺ️ Radar
β–ͺ️ Lidar

They all have different advantages and disadvantages. Read below to learn more about them.

Thread πŸ‘‡
1️⃣ Camera

The camera is arguably the most important sensor - the camera images contain the most information compared to the other sensors.

Modern cars across all self-driving levels have many cameras for a 360Β° coverage:
β–ͺ️ BMW 8 series - 7
β–ͺ️ Tesla - 8
β–ͺ️ Waymo - 29
This is an example from Tesla of what a typical camera sees and detects in the scene. Videos from other companies look very similar.

Read 9 tweets
19 Apr
End-to-end approach to self-driving πŸŽ₯ πŸ•ΈοΈ πŸ•ΉοΈ

I recently wrote about the classical software architecture for a self-driving car. The end-to-end approach is an interesting alternative.

The idea is to go directly from images to the control commands.

Let me tell you more... πŸ‘‡ Image
This approach is actually very old, dating back to 1989 and the ALVINN model by CMU. It is a 3-layer neural network using camera images and a laser range finder.

Again, this was back in 1989... 🀯

papers.nips.cc/paper/1988/fil… Image
A modern example is Nvidia's PilotNet - a Convolutional Neural Network with 250M parameters, which takes as input the raw camera image and predicts directly the steering angle of the car.

No explicit lane boundary or freespace detection needed!

arxiv.org/abs/1604.07316 Image
Read 13 tweets
15 Apr
Open-Source Self-Driving Car Simulators πŸ•ΉοΈ πŸš™

You want to play around with self-driving car software and gather some experience? Check out these open-source self-driving car simulators!

Details below πŸ‘‡
CARLA

CARLA is a great software developed by Intel. You can use it to work on any step of the pipeline, model different sensors, maps, traffic. It also integrates with ROS.

carla.org
Deepdive from Voyage

Another great simulator by Voyage - the self-driving company that was recently acuired by Cruise. It is built on the Unreal Engine and supports lots of features.

deepdrive.voyage.auto
Read 11 tweets
14 Apr
Useful online courses on self-driving cars 🧠 πŸš™

Here is a list of useful courses if you want to learn about software for self-driving cars.

Some of the courses are paid, but all platforms offer regular discounts and financial aids if you can't affor them.

Thread πŸ‘‡
Udacity Self-Driving Car Nanodegree

This program offers hands on experience on all kind of relevant topics like perception, localization, planning and control. It takes a lot of time, but it is worth it.

In the end, your code is run on an actual car!

udacity.com/course/self-dr…
Udacity Introduction Course by Apollo

This is a beginner course explaining the different components of a self-driving car. Apollo is the self-driving division of Baidu.

udacity.com/course/self-dr…
Read 8 tweets

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