Development and Implementation of an Autonomously Driven Vehicle Prototype

Technology has become cheaper and more accessible, giving way to opportunities in technological areas that were previously inaccessible. Moreover, building a fully functional self-driving vehicle has become the new gold rush in the current industries. Yet, there are many issues to solve when building an autonomous vehicle. For instance, a self-driving vehicle must be reliable, consistent, predictable, and safe. There is still substantial amount of research and work that needs to be done, and more to learn, for the industry to build a truly reliable self-driving vehicle. In this paper the basic concepts of self-driving vehicles as well as some advanced concepts have been discussed. This project explores building a self-driving car using an off-the-shelf remote-controlled car, an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU which has an ARM processor on board, infra-red sensors for obstacle avoidance, and a monocular CSI camera for navigation and object detection. A combination of Google's TensorFlow, OpenCV and a Robot Operating System (ROS) enables the remote-controlled car into becoming a fully self-driving car.