Introduction to Udacity Self-Driving Car Simulator

Udacity recently made its self-driving car simulator source code available on their GitHub which was originally built to teach their Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree students.

Now, anybody can take advantage of the useful tool to train your machine learning models to clone driving behavior.

In this article, I’ll explain:

• What you can do with it
• How to set up the simulator
• Deep Learning driver example

What You Can Do with it?

You can manually drive a car to generate training data, or your machine learning model can autonomously drive for testing.

In the main screen of the simulator, you can choose a scene and a mode.

Simulator Main Screen

First, you choose a scene by clicking one of the scene pictures. In the above, the lake side scene (the left) is selected.

Next, you choose a mode: Training Mode or Autonomous Mode. As soon as you click one of the mode buttons, a car appears at the start position.

Simulator Train Mode

Training Mode