Behavioral Cloning 🚘

Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree

Project 4

Introduction

Track 1	Track 2

In this project, we will use what we've learned about deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks to clone driving behavior. We will train, validate and test a model using Keras. The model will output a steering angle to an autonomous vehicle.

The goals / steps of this project are the following:

Use the simulator to collect data of good driving behavior
Design, train and validate a model that predicts a steering angle from image data
Use the model to drive the vehicle autonomously around the track in the simulator. The vehicle should remain on the road for an entire loop around the track.

Getting Started

Step 1: Set up the CarND Term1 Starter Kit if you haven't already.

Step 2: Open the code in a Jupyter Notebook

You will complete the project code in a Jupyter notebook. If you are unfamiliar with Jupyter Notebooks, check out Udacity's free course on Anaconda and Jupyter Notebooks to get started.

Jupyter is an Ipython notebook where you can run blocks of code and see results interactively. All the code for this project is contained in a Jupyter notebook. To start Jupyter in your browser, use terminal to navigate to your project directory and then run the following command at the terminal prompt (be sure you've activated your Python 3 carnd-term1 environment as described in the CarND Term1 Starter Kit installation instructions!):

> jupyter notebook

Details About Files In This Directory

`drive.py`

Usage of drive.py requires you have saved the trained model as an h5 file, i.e. model.h5. See the Keras documentation for how to create this file using the following command:

model.save(filepath)

Once the model has been saved, it can be used with drive.py using this command:

python drive.py model.h5

The above command will load the trained model and use the model to make predictions on individual images in real-time and send the predicted angle back to the server via a websocket connection.

Note: There is known local system's setting issue with replacing "," with "." when using drive.py. When this happens it can make predicted steering values clipped to max/min values. If this occurs, a known fix for this is to add "export LANG=en_US.utf8" to the bashrc file.

Saving a video of the autonomous agent

python drive.py model.h5 run1

The fourth argument, run1, is the directory in which to save the images seen by the agent. If the directory already exists, it'll be overwritten.

ls run1

[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_424.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_451.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_477.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_528.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_573.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_618.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_697.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_723.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_749.jpg
[2017-01-09 16:10:23 EST]  12KiB 2017_01_09_21_10_23_817.jpg
...

The image file name is a timestamp of when the image was seen. This information is used by video.py to create a chronological video of the agent driving.

`video.py`

python video.py run1

Creates a video based on images found in the run1 directory. The name of the video will be the name of the directory followed by '.mp4', so, in this case the video will be run1.mp4.

Optionally, one can specify the FPS (frames per second) of the video:

python video.py run1 --fps 48

Will run the video at 48 FPS. The default FPS is 60.

Ansheel9/Behavioral-Cloning