NVDIA Jetson Nano allows high school students to build AI self-driving cars! -AI4kids

AI self-driving car racing competition attracts high school students from north, central and south China to gather for the challenge

During the 2022 winter vacation, AI4kids designed a four-day AI self-driving car implementation competition at the Feng Chia University Smart Innovation Port using NVIDIA Jetson nano edge computing, attracting young people from all over Taipei, Central, and Southern Taiwan to sign up! Led by AI4kids’ professional lecturers and teaching assistants, the students went from building their initial machine learning and deep learning knowledge to becoming familiar with JetBot car hardware assembly, motion control (basic programming, remote control), and intelligent control (obstacle avoidance, object following), and finally being able to independently train the AI ​​visual recognition model and complete the Jetbot self-driving car racing competition !

How to give a racing car AI vision?

The self-driving car competition venue is a square track. The challenge for students is that they cannot use any remote control or program settings, but must let the car complete a lap of the track in the shortest number of seconds through computer vision to win. During the process, a group of two must first complete the track image collection, AI model training and correction, and conduct multiple test verifications and parameter fine-tuning. Most of the trainees were trying to train their own AI models for the first time, so they encountered challenges such as reflections from the track when shooting images, uneven road surfaces, incorrect parameter settings leading to poor vehicle control, etc. They had to make multiple adjustments before the car could run a lap smoothly. After spending half a day training, the trainees all exclaimed, "Time is so tight!"

"On the third day, we were mainly training the jetbot to walk on the road we designed, but the process was not very smooth. The jetbot kept moving around and going in circles, which surprised me because I thought the jetbot was easy to train, but it was not what I thought. We then asked the jetbot to take more images of the road so that it could recognize it." - Liu, a student from Douliu High School

Competition Champion-"It's not as easy as you think after you try it!"

"On the third day, we started designing the image recognition car for each group and collecting data. Because it is difficult for us to know the results of the machine training, we took more than 200 photos at the beginning. We thought that this would be a lot of data, but the car just ran around on the road. So we increased the number of samples to more than 1,000. The training of Jetbot takes a lot of time, and we have to continue training the next day." ——-Lin, a student from Hongwen High School

Jetbot self-driving car video recording

Not only are there practical courses, but the basic knowledge is also not neglected!

The first day of the four-day camp will lead everyone into the field of artificial intelligence, using courses on neural networks, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and Python programming language to allow students to have a deeper understanding of this field. The second day was an advanced understanding of the world of robotics, including embedded single-board computers (Jetson Family), robot brain and visual installation (OS & Camera), deep learning (NVIDIA Jetson-inference) and computer vision applications (detection, recognition, segmentation).

"On the third day, I mainly practiced the self-driving car program and trained the self-driving car for image recognition. In the afternoon, I set up the track needed for the fourth day and adjusted the self-driving car. The difficulty is that the self-driving car is prone to disconnection when connecting to the network, which requires continuous debugging of the device and program. In addition to learning more programs today, I also started to practice how to let the self-driving car perform image training and road detection. Maybe I am still unfamiliar with the entire system, so there will be many mistakes during training." - Zheng, a student from Kaohsiung High School

Study resume, fully feedback the learning process and gains!

At the end of each day of the camp, students are given ten minutes to review the key points of today’s course and the knowledge they have absorbed, and to write a learning resume to have a complete record of their learning process. In addition, this camp also provides hands-on teaching to guide each student to obtain the NVDIA "Getting Started with AI on Jeston" international certification, enriching their own four-day learning files!

Four-day camp opens up high school students’ AI horizons!

This four-day course really brought many different experiences and brainstorming to each student. We open the door to the field of AI robots and self-driving cars for students, and hope that every student will be able to explore more deeply and create more self-driving car-related applications in the future!

"Through daily learning, I gradually like computer-related things more and more. Through the camp, I also began to know where my future path lies. No matter where the future path is, at least I have learned a skill. Through more in-depth learning, I also know what real AI is, and it has broken my previous understanding of these things. I have made a lot of friends here and got a certificate, but more importantly, I have learned some programming skills." - Xu from Pingtung High School

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