DeepRacer Racing League
AUTONOMOUS RACING
1/18th scale autonomous racing league right here in Santa Cruz! Welcome Race Fans! This is the place where we gather together to explore Machine Learning and Autonomous Driving. The seed was planted in 2019 with the release of the AWS DeepRacer Platform. Our organizer won the AWS Summit Race in Santa Clara and was inspired to provide a place to learn together, share knowledge, and sponsor a little friendly competition.
DeepRacer started as a single camera and compute module mounted atop a 4-Wheel Drive RC truck chassis. From inception to present, race lap times dropped from 51 seconds to under 9 seconds. Continuing into the 2020 race season, AWS added a second camera for Stereo Vision and a LiDAR sensor for object avoidance. These new sensors significantly complicate the Reinforcement Learning reward system. As a result, it’s going to be a more challenging season in 2020!
Our Santa Cruz DeepRacer Meetup Group meets on the second Tuesday of each month to explore the DeepRacer platform, strategize on the best approaches for building reward functions and tuning hyper parameters, and to deep dive into the SageMaker platform for advanced model training and log analysis. In addition we have race day events and will build out a series of different tracks. Who know’s where this will lead us?
Wanna get involved? Fantastic! Use the link above and signup for the meetup group. Don’t know anything about machine learning? Not to worry, the point of DeepRacer is to make Machine Learning approachable to developers of all levels. For our sponsor Cloud Brigade, this created a whole new fire inside the company which has pushed us into a variety of really cool ML/AI projects.
If you are new to DeepRacer, you’ll want to get started with some basic reading and create a free AWS account. You can also connect with your local and global community on the Slack channel. There’s no shortage of resources to help you on this journey, so fear not new DeepRacer inductee.
Perhaps the biggest opportunity in joining our group is joining a community of like minded individuals and the relationships you will form here. We had a great turnout at our first meetup and a substantial member base for a new meetup. We look forward to meeting with you!
Chris Miller
Founder – Santa Cruz DeepRacer Meetup
