> That's total bullshit.

Udacity has their own self-driving vehicle. They built it for their Self-Driving Vehicle Car Engineer Nanodegree program; I just started term 3 yesterday, and apparently they're going ahead with the plan for student to run code on it.

https://medium.com/udacity/term-3-in-depth-on-udacitys-self-...

Apparently, they have a test track, and will have a safety driver on-board. For that part of the term (dubbed "Integration"), we'll be broken into teams of 10-20 students, and (somehow) have to coordinate on building the software pieces to run on the vehicle. This will all be done using a custom simulator designed to replicate the test track (similar to what has already been used). Once something is working, the group will then merge the pieces (nodes and modules for ROS and something called AutoWare) all together in a shared github repo. That'll be shipped over to Udacity for testing on "track days", and results sent back to the team for analysis.

I'm not sure how well this whole thing is going to work; it's very much an experiment that I believe is unique for a MOOC and hasn't been tried before (develop software as a group project of international students, to drive a real self-driving vehicle on a test track in Mountain View, CA - yep, that seems reasonable).

I guess we'll see when we get there. The vehicle is named "Carla", and (overall) it is open-sourced. Here are some links to learn more about it:

https://www.udacity.com/self-driving-car

https://github.com/udacity/self-driving-car

http://www.ros.org/

http://www.tier4.jp/

https://github.com/CPFL/Autoware

The vehicle itself is apparently some standard vehicle converted by a third-party company (for the life of me, I can't recall the make or model of the vehicle, nor the company that did the conversion!); if you wanted to DIY this yourself at full scale, you'd basically want a vehicle that uses a mostly drive-by-wire control system for the brakes, accelerator, and steering. If that isn't available, then something that uses electro-hydraulic power braking and steering (or electric power-steering) would be the next best thing.

I'd shy away from trying to do this with a standard vehicle; building the actuators you would need to control everything is not a trivial thing to do (and especially to do so safely and reliably).

Honestly, if you really wanted to do this, and you didn't want to kill yourself, others, or damage property (as much?) - start out smaller with an RC car or similar. There are plenty of examples on how to do this on the internet, but my favorite go-to example is this one:

http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/

That one occupies a "soft spot" in me because David Singleton was one of the original students in the Stanford-sponsored ML Class of 2011, taught by Andrew Ng. I was a part of that class; it taught us enough to build such a vehicle, and David was inspired to do so and follow thru with it. What used to cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars (if not millions) back in the 1980s:

https://ftp.utcluj.ro/pub///docs/imaging/Autonomous_driving/...

...could in 2011 be done for much, much less.

Final note: I don't have any association with any of this other than being a student in the Udacity course and interested in learning about this technology.