RoboCar

RoboCar is Epitech’s self-driving car race: a small real car, a track drawn with white lines, and no one at the controls. A team of seven built everything between the camera and the wheels.

How it works

The car first learned in a racing simulator, then on the real track. A human drives it around while it records what it sees and what the driver does; a model then learns to do the same. What the model sees is not the camera image itself but a handful of distances to the road lines, the way a lidar would measure them. That view comes from MaskGenerator, the vision part, which was mine. An onboard computer runs the model and drives the motor and steering, with a gamepad to take over.

What I took from it

• A model trained in a simulator meets a different world on a real track; keeping its input simple (a few distances, not a whole picture) is what let it cross over.
• On a team of seven, clear boundaries between parts (vision, learning, driving) mattered as much as any of the parts.