Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Hardware Hackers Aren’t Waiting for Self Driving Cars to Hit the Road.”.
Welcome to make i’m tyler and today we’re going to do something a little bit different. A few weeks ago we got to stop by the oakland meetup of diy robocars, a gathering of autonomous car enthusiasts, who aren’t content to wait for google or tesla to develop the technology, so they’re ready to jump in feet first and start developing their own technology. Let’S check it out, so i’m chris anderson um, i do a bunch of things. By day i run 3dr the drone company um. I have this hobby of starting kind of robotics communities.
So, 10 years ago i started diy drones, which then turned into 3dr industrialized that one and it just feels like it’s time to do it again, um with the next challenge, which is cars so um. I started another group called diy robocars.com and the whole point is once again to be sort of the homebrew computing club for an industry where you have big companies doing you know really sophisticated stuff, but there’s an opportunity for amateurs, diyers makers, to participate in a way. That’S cheap, easy and fun. So today we are in west oakland in a warehouse where earlier today we had a hackathon race of autonomous cars.
These cars, these cars are small, they’re, cheap, uh, they’re kind of hacked together um. But the point is that they’re using much of the same software sensor techniques as tesla or or a google autonomous car, you know all the car companies will all have autonomous car projects full of phds. Why are we? Why are we bothering, you know, reinventing the wheel and the answer is um? Is that uh? That’S exactly what people said when we did diy drones? It’S like the aerospace industry has been making drones for for decades um, but they weren’t cheap. They weren’t available to regular people, they weren’t fun, they weren’t easy. So this bottoms up approach and there’s a long tradition in silicon valley, kind of a home, brew version of industries and the reason you do it is that when you come bottoms up, you actually end up in a different place than when you come top down. So let me give you an example: um responsible car companies are going to optimize around safety, we’re dealing with little cars right now, we’re not optimizing around safety, we’re optimizing around, let’s say cheap or we’re optimizing around fun or aggressiveness in the case of in the case Of racing um, and so by being amateurs by not having humans involved by not being you know, by not kind of coming at this with the sort of first, we must like it make them like super pro, and then we can go on the street.
We hope to end up in a different place. We hope to actually be able to innovate. So you start with you know some some very simple chassis um. You know you can get these little robot chassis, for you know less than a hundred dollars on amazon um.
So that’s just like the motor, the motor drivers etc, and then, on top of that we typically put a raspberry pi, but it doesn’t have to be uh. It has to be something from stream. Video, so typically arduino is not enough, but then all the key stuff is all is all software, and that is um and that’s just stuff running open source stuff running on on your laptop, so that’ll be opencv, it’ll be tensorflow, it’ll be ross, and if you run It on your laptop with the you know, with just the data streaming to it: um, you have uh just these extraordinary tools. Now, of course, this doesn’t scale to the real world right in the real world. You can’t run over wi-fi, but there’s no reason why that that architecture you set up with a robot. You know, with a camera streaming data to wi-fi to a laptop, just put the laptop on board a real car and the exact same architecture works uh. So i’ve just uh set up a site, uh sort of sister site to diy drones, called diyrobocars.com um, and so that’s, where we’re going to be just documenting the build logs um the list of all the software and hardware and sort of you know helping you get Started and – and we also have meetups so there’s a meetup group – that’s also called diy rebel cars and we’ll have mail lists and all that sort of thing, but start with that site and you’ll go from there. You .