FL Polytech's 2017 Autonomous Vehicle Course

I was part of the inaugural Autonomous Vehicle class started by Dr.Dean Bushey at FL Polytechnic based off MIT’s down-scale R.A.C.E.C.A.R. It was an essentially independent study where three teams of students would work though milestone labs. I was the head programmer of my team. A few of us students also gave talks and demos to outside groups. I gave a 30 minute introduction to autonomous vehicle workshop at PolyHacks 2017. This one of the most fun and exciting courses/projects I’ve been a part of.

The cars have a TX1 computer running ROS along with a variety of sensors. After building the car on a stripped down RC chassis, we started with basic lane/wall following using the LiDAR – “stay middle” as I called it. We then continued to visual servoing and shape detection with the ZED color stereo camera, mapping, localization, and finally path finding. The course concluded with a final ‘engineering brief’ and demonstration from each team.

All code written and used at various points is in this git repo. It also includes a course log that I started putting together due to limited practical documentation of getting started with each of the milestones.

I recorded many videos of our progress though the semester and edited them into a single video (below). I also cut that down further into an additional one minute summary video. My team’s car is the one with blue camera ‘nose’.