Donkey: Building Self Driving Cars with Will Roscoe

Episode • Oct 22, 2017 • 33m

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?