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The final week was spent on wrapping up all the work done throughout the 3 months including documentation.

This summer has been the most exciting summer ever! It was great to work on a really cool project and apply what I know in Robotics Domain and web Development in which I’m very much interested in, and learn more about both along the way.

I would like to thank José María Cañas and Luis Roberto Morales for helping and guiding me all the way, making this possible.

This blog post describes some final thoughts and comments regarding the future scope and improvements to the project.

Achievements

During the course of these 3 months, we developed working Ackermann car models with sensor interfaces to be used in CarJunction Exercise and AutoParking Exercise of JdeRobot RoboticsAcademy. The contents of the project include:

  • Lincoln Mkz Model: An Ackermann car model with great aesthetics, physics, and looks that are very close to the real-life self-driving car.

  • Ford Model: Lincoln Mkz is less widely used so we came up with a choice for students who want to try out the ford model inside Exercises.

  • 3D Lidar: The 3D Lidar was really an aspiration for both my mentors and me. Self-Driving cars such as Waymo were an inspiration for this feature and now RoboticsAcademy also has one.

  • GPS Sensor and Cameras: GPS Sensors and Cameras have been added as a part of implementation for the current exercise requirements and also keeping in mind the upcoming exercises like Navigation Exercise using GPS only method.

Future Scope

We weren’t quite able to accomplish all the objectives of the proposal, but completed all we could. Some of the improvements that I can focus in the future are:

  • Integration: The Models are ready to be deployed to the RoboticsAcademy Docker Image, although a significant effort was made, Integrating them required a development life cycle that seems to take time, I plan on doing this post-GSoC.

  • New GPS Exercise: GPS Navigation teaches a lot about the inner-working and the algorithms used in self-driving cars, this would help in giving a boost towards implementation of Ackermann steering and Navigation at ease for the students.

Personal Thoughts

The 3-month journey of GSoC was quite amazing. I really enjoyed writing the code and learning new things about coding, Docker, Django and evolutionary robotics. It was great being mentored by José María Sir and Luis Roberto Sir.

I would like to work further on the project post-GSOC by accepting membership of the JdeRobot Organization.

Final Product Teasers

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