Sebastian Thrun’ s TED Talk and TEDx Brussels Talk struck me. Shortly after, I found his Artificial Intelligence for Robotics Course at Udacity and thought I could start a hobby project, a self-driving RC car. If this hobby project makes fair amount of progress it could hopefully pave the way for a miniature version of DARPA Grand Challenge with RC cars. Moreover, we can move solar cars one step further and arrange driverless solar car races. Article Stanley: The Robot that Won the DARPA Grand Challenge gives a great insight into the format of the challenge. The miniature challenge can also use a similar format.

Having taken the course at Udacity, I have just started implementing a self-driving RC car. The car is fundamentally going to be made up for four broad subjects. Path tracking control, localization, obstacle avoidance, and path planning. I hope to cover multiple approaches for each subject as I learn them. I use Jupyter Notebook to study and document theoretical concepts and implement them on an Arduino UNO to see how they look like in practice.

Here is the video for the first part in the series. Please see the my git repository for the details.