New Maintainers
The Donkey Car project is almost 4 years old now; projects like this only survive because of a strong community (you) and the tireless work of open source maintainers. For those who don’t know, our current maintainers are: Tawn Kramer, Ed Murphy, Chris Anderson, Rahul Ravikumar and Adam Conway; Will Roscoe, who co-founded the project has moved on from the project but still checks in with his “maintainer emeritus” status. To those existing 5 maintainers we are adding 6 more maintainers. This will greatly increase the momentum of the project. These are all people who have been very supportive of the Donkey Car Project.
Jonathan Tse @Jonathan Tse - Jonathan has been involved with the project for many years. He runs the Robocar store in Hong Kong and has been dedicated to bringing Donkey to education. He is also the creator of the Donkey Car App!
Dirk @DGarbonzo has been a long time contributor to Donkey Car, he has done many a PR and helped many people in the community.
Thomas Coyle @TCIII - Thomas is a retired systems engineer and has been a huge contributor to many open source projects - in particular he has been a huge supporter of Ardupilot and Dronecode, we are happy to have him now help with Donkey Car.
Maxime Ellerbach @redplex - Maxime is a student based out of France and will be focused on the simulator and the map creation. He has been collaborating with Tawn for quite some time and has produced an auto map generator.
Jack Silberman @JackSilb - Jack is a professor at UCSD teaching robotics. He has been a long time promoter of the project and even teaches an undergraduate course based on the Donkey Car project. He is famous for bringing a whole gaggle of students up to Oakland from San Diego to compete in the Robocar races (and often cleaning up).
Paul Huliganga @Paulh - Paul is a long time electronics hobbyist and enthusiast who enjoys building robots and autonomous machines. He is an active member of the Ottawa Autonomous Vehicle Group (OAVG) where he learned about Donkey Cars and started diving into Machine Learning. Paul is also a member of the Parking Lot Nerds team that has been participating in this summer's Virtual Races. This is a truly international team made up of members from the Stuttgart Connected Autonomous Driving Group, Detroit Autonomous Vehicle Group (DAVG), and Ottawa Autonomous Vehicle Group.
If you are interested in being a maintainer, we are willing to add one or two more right now. What we look for is a history of high quality PRs or other support to the community.
Donkey Car 4.0!
We are doing a major new release of Donkey Car! This is being lead by Rahul and will be released in the next few days!
Datastore v2
We will be replacing the long standing Tub Datastore with Datastore v2. The new Datastore brings many new features including:
Arbitrary augmentations. This will allow preprocessing when training. There will be a few preprocessing directives out of the box such as cropping and trapezoidal masking.
Improved API
Better performance
Tensorflow 2.x and PyTorch Support
Support for Tensorflow 2.2, Tensorflow lite and TensorRT upgrades.
Support for PyTorch and Fast.ai models.
Stretch goal: Transfer learn a Resnet18 based model.
Technical Debt and Cleanup
Cleanup `manage.py` and remove redundant, less used features.
Stretch: Threaded Part v2 design. Deprecate non-threaded parts completely.
Stretch: Organize parts to their new folders.
Improve documentation in 4.x, especially given that some things are going to break.
Robocar Controller
Jonathan Tse, who is one of our new maintainers, created new app for Donkey Car. It is in the Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store. The Robocar Controller is designed to provide a “commandless” user experience to get started with the Donkey Car.
Command-less experience - No SSH or text editor
Built-in Hotspot
Search vehicle on the network
Real-time Calibration
Virtual joystick
Visualize the data
Drive Summary
Free GPU training
Autopilot
Advanced configuration
Battery level
Other odds and ends
Join the community on Discord! For those of you who are interested in the project or need help it is a great place to get started. The link is here.
Join our virtual races! The link is here to register or watch.