Visiting Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Training Center in China

A pioneering training center, developed jointly with Tier IV and PIX, provides an opportunity for students to work in teams on their own self-driving car.

Last week I had the privilege of visiting Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Training Center in Guiyang, China.

This is a facility that our colleagues on Udacity’s China team have developed jointly with Tier IV (the creators of Autoware) and PIX (an autonomous vehicle startup in Guiyang). The center provides an opportunity for students from all over China to come together and work in teams for a week on their own self-driving car. Over the course of the program, they install all of their own software and get the car driving itself around a test track, stopping at traffic lights and stop lines.

This is such an amazing program!

Bringing together teams of students to work in-person on a self-driving car is a tremendous experience that was exceptionally valuable for the students at the Training Center.

Watching and participating with students working on self-driving cars in western China, I was reminded of how huge the talent pool is, all over the world, for people who want to build autonomous vehicles.

Check out this video of one of the team’s getting their car to drive!

https://youtu.be/MfCTiRl3j-c

As we continue to move forward into the future of autonomous transportation, opportunities to experience firsthand the migration from theory to practice—and from online to on the street—will become ever more valuable to then engineers engaged in making this future a reality. I am excited that Udacity’s China team is helping to make this kind of experience possible for aspiring autonomous engineers, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to watch it all in action.

Are you interested in joining the next generation of talent building the future of autonomous transportation? Visit our School of Autonomous Systems today!

Experience Self-Driving Trucks in India with Flux Auto

See the prototype in action—10km of autonomous highway driving!

One of the great joys of teaching self-driving cars at Udacity is watching the amazing things our students build. I’m based in Silicon Valley, but our students come from all over the world, and I have the opportunity on a daily basis to experience the truly global nature of this transportation revolution.

Case in point: Flux Auto.

One of our Udacity self-driving car graduates, Shilpaj Bhalerao, is the tech lead for a small team building self-driving trucks in India. This is no small feat. India is even more of a challenge for self-driving cars than other parts of the world, due to the complexity of traffic norms, and the infrastructure quality. So it’s super-exciting to watch their 10km autonomous trucking run in action.

Check it out.

No matter where you are in the world, if your dream is to contribute to the future of autonomous transportation, then you can acquire the skills you need with Udacity. Check out our School of Autonomous Systems today.

Self-Driving Fundamentals: Lesson 1

Discover why our free “Self-Driving Fundamentals: Featuring Apollo” course is such an ideal starting point for anyone new to the field of autonomous systems.

Self-Driving Fundamentals: Featuring Apollo is a terrific, free introduction to how self-driving cars work, through the lens of the Apollo open-source self-driving car project.

It’s perfect for beginners who are in the exploratory phase of their autonomous systems journey, and it does a great job demonstrating how existing basic programming and data skills can be applied to this field.

Upon successfully completing the program, you’ll be ready to combine your newly-acquired self-driving car fundamentals with your existing programming skills to enroll in our Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree program.

The course begins with an overview of self-driving cars, and how they work. From there, we dive into Apollo and it’s multi-layer architecture: reference vehicle, reference hardware, open-source software, and cloud services.

Self-Driving Fundamentals: Featuring Apollo is led by the leaders of the Apollo project, Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun, and me!

This is a great opportunity to learn the key parts of self-driving cars, and get to know the Apollo architecture. You’ll utilize Apollo HD maps, localization, perception, prediction, planning and control, and start learning the fundamentals of how to build self-driving cars.

And it’s free! You should learn about self-driving cars with us 🚗