The purpose of this project was to develop a Machine Learning model to enable an RC car to autonomously navigate a race track using an Ouster OS1 lidar sensor as the primary sensor input. The model is an end-to-end Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that processes intensity image data from the lidar and outputs a steering command for the RC car.
This is inspired by the Udacity Self Driving Car “behavior cloning” module as well as the DIY Robocars races. This project builds upon earlier work developing a similar model using color camera images from a webcam to autonomously navigate the RC car.
This post covers the development of a data pipeline for collecting and processing training data, the compilation and training of the ML model using Google Colab, and the integration and deployment of the model on the RC car using ROS.
