In Part 4 and Part 5 of the blog series, we discussed lane detection and navigation. A true autonomous vehicle would also need to be aware of its surroundings at all times. In this article, we will discuss another important perception feature, namely, detecting traffic signs and pedestrians. Note this feature is not available in any 2019 vehicles, except maybe Tesla. We will train DeepPiCar to identify and respond to (miniaturized) traffic signs and pedestrians in real time. We will also utilize the $75 Google Edge TPU accelerator that just came out in early 2019!
Note to readers who have not purchased any hardware: For the first half of this article, you can follow along with just a PC, since we will be training our model in the Cloud.