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Autonomous Driving Car V2

Curious about autonomous driving, AI and neural networks? Build your own autonomous driving car and get your hands on these topics!

This project is all about building a cool self-driving car using some fun and exciting technology! We’ll be using a Raspberry Pi as the driver of the car to make all the decisions and see the world through a camera. We’ll also be using a XMC microcontroller board to control the car’s steering and speed. To make the car move, we’ll be using a Motix DC motor shield that sits on top of the XMC boot kit.

Donkey Car
Donkey Car is an open-source platform for building and experimenting with self-driving cars. It provides an easy-to-use software framework that allows users to quickly and easily train and deploy machine learning models on a small, inexpensive hardware platform, such as the Raspberry Pi.

The platform includes a variety of pre-built software components for tasks such as image processing, control, and communication, making it easy for users to get started with building their own self-driving car. Additionally, the community provides a lot of resources such as tutorials, documentation, and sample code, which can help users to understand the inner workings of the platform and learn how to build their own projects.

The Donkey Car project runs on the Raspberry Pi and acts like the driver.You collect datasets while driving your car remote controlled. This datasets are then used to train a neural network to drive the car on its own.

Wait machines can actually learn??
A neural network is like a computer brain that can learn to do different things like recognizing pictures or controlling a car. It’s made of many small parts called neurons that work together to take in information and make decisions or predictions. We can train a neural network by giving it examples of what we want it to do, and it will adjust itself to do so (it learns). Neuronal networks are used in different fields like image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing and self-driving cars. In summary, a neural network is a computer program that can learn to do different tasks by analyzing data and examples.

The Raspberry Pi takes in power from a 5V power supply. (Any power bank should do the trick here ;)). The camera connected to it records the surrounding environment and the pictures are fed into a neural network which determines what the next moves of the car should be.

The communication between Raspberry Pi and XMC microcontroller is based on I2C.”

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