Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program
The model is the same motion model that was used in the class with states: ego vehicle x position, ego vehicle y position, ego vehicle heading (psi), ego vehicle longitudinal velocity, cross track error, and heading error. To these, I added the steer angle. In practice, I think this would let me model the dynamics of the steering system, from command to the actual tire steer angle.
I chose a value of 0.1 sec for dt because it fit with the model latency and a value of 10 loops for N to keep the compute time small-ish. I had some stability trouble with the simulator sometimes publishing bad JSON data, which would cause the MPC program to throw a 'parse error' but that trouble did not seem to be related to compute time.
The only MPC preprocessing was to transform the waypoints to the vehicle coordinate system then a 3rd order polynomial was fit to the waypoints. The resulting polynomial was evaluated and used as the desired path. Given more time to work on the project, I would want to smooth the waypoints to reduce or avoid the abrupt changes in the desired path.
My solution for latency includes adding a state for the steering signal. This seems to be more sensible than projecting the measured state forward because, in real life, this additional steering state could model the dynamics of the steering system.
- cmake >= 3.5
- All OSes: click here for installation instructions
- make >= 4.1
- Linux: make is installed by default on most Linux distros
- Mac: install Xcode command line tools to get make
- Windows: Click here for installation instructions
- gcc/g++ >= 5.4
- Linux: gcc / g++ is installed by default on most Linux distros
- Mac: same deal as make - [install Xcode command line tools]((https://developer.apple.com/xcode/features/)
- Windows: recommend using MinGW
- uWebSockets == 0.13, but the master branch will probably work just fine
- Follow the instructions in the uWebSockets README to get setup for your platform. You can download the zip of the appropriate version from the releases page. Here's a link to the v0.13 zip.
- If you have MacOS and have Homebrew installed you can just run the ./install-mac.sh script to install this.
- Ipopt
- Mac:
brew install ipopt --with-openblas
- Linux
- You will need a version of Ipopt 3.12.1 or higher. The version available through
apt-get
is 3.11.x. If you can get that version to work great but if not there's a scriptinstall_ipopt.sh
that will install Ipopt. You just need to download the source from here. - Then call
install_ipopt.sh
with the source directory as the first argument, ex:bash install_ipopt.sh Ipopt-3.12.1
.
- You will need a version of Ipopt 3.12.1 or higher. The version available through
- Windows: TODO. If you can use the Linux subsystem and follow the Linux instructions.
- Mac:
- CppAD
- Mac:
brew install cppad
- Linux
sudo apt-get install cppad
or equivalent. - Windows: TODO. If you can use the Linux subsystem and follow the Linux instructions.
- Mac:
- Simulator. You can download these from the releases tab.
- Clone this repo.
- Make a build directory:
mkdir build && cd build
- Compile:
cmake .. && make
- Run it:
./mpc
.
It's recommended to test the MPC on basic examples to see if your implementation behaves as desired. One possible example is the vehicle starting offset of a straight line (reference). If the MPC implementation is correct, after some number of timesteps (not too many) it should find and track the reference line.
We've purposefully kept editor configuration files out of this repo in order to keep it as simple and environment agnostic as possible. However, we recommend using the following settings:
- indent using spaces
- set tab width to 2 spaces (keeps the matrices in source code aligned)
Please (do your best to) stick to Google's C++ style guide.
Note: regardless of the changes you make, your project must be buildable using cmake and make!
More information is only accessible by people who are already enrolled in Term 2 of CarND. If you are enrolled, see the project page for instructions and the project rubric.
- You don't have to follow this directory structure, but if you do, your work will span all of the .cpp files here. Keep an eye out for TODOs.
Help your fellow students!
We decided to create Makefiles with cmake to keep this project as platform agnostic as possible. Similarly, we omitted IDE profiles in order to we ensure that students don't feel pressured to use one IDE or another.
However! I'd love to help people get up and running with their IDEs of choice. If you've created a profile for an IDE that you think other students would appreciate, we'd love to have you add the requisite profile files and instructions to ide_profiles/. For example if you wanted to add a VS Code profile, you'd add:
- /ide_profiles/vscode/.vscode
- /ide_profiles/vscode/README.md
The README should explain what the profile does, how to take advantage of it, and how to install it.
Frankly, I've never been involved in a project with multiple IDE profiles before. I believe the best way to handle this would be to keep them out of the repo root to avoid clutter. My expectation is that most profiles will include instructions to copy files to a new location to get picked up by the IDE, but that's just a guess.
One last note here: regardless of the IDE used, every submitted project must still be compilable with cmake and make./