Driverless Car workshops – a five week course

Digital Maker CIC recently completed two 5-week driverless car workshops in Aberdeen. Northfield academy’s Science Club & Transition Extreme After School Club each had an exciting and challenging set of workshops for children aged 12+. Digital Maker CIC believes that these workshops are a “first” for the UK. Both projects were funded by Aberdeen City Council’s “U-decide” (participatory budgeting project).

The participants learned about Machine Learning, Engineering & design of the 1:16th scale cars, raspberry Pi terminal commands, to interface with the cars, computers    & cloud computing interfaces and driving the remote-controlled cars.

Working in teams of four, the pupils were given tasks of constructing & managing their cars, “training” and improving their driving skills, as the better the car is driven, the better the Machine Learning model will be. The pupils could quickly train & then produce ML models (via cloud computing), giving exciting results, as the cars drove themselves around the 4m2 tracks we use. The pupils quickly learned that the better they drove the cars, the automated driving improved.

The teams also tried to add obstacles (orange cones) into the modelling, creating various results (success & failure), but, with more training & time, the pupils understood that their cars would “get better” with time.

We’d like to thank Northfield Academy & Transition Extreme Sports Ltd for their support & use of space, in order that we could run the workshops. We are working on extending the workshops to Aberdeenshire & eventually have a North East interschools competition for the Driverless Car technology.

If you’d like more information, or want your school to participate in this project, please do get in touch!

AwesomeTech@digital-maker.co.uk

Driverless Car Workshop – Call to Participate.

Digital Maker CIC are looking for 20 young people (11-18 years old) to join us for a five week course at Transition Extreme to build, maintain, program and use driverless cars!

Working in teams, we will build a state of the art 1/16th scale car, learn about the technology involved in running an A.I (Artificial Intelligence) robot in order to train & race them!

The 20 spaces are free to join (thanks to the U-Decide funding from Aberdeen City Council), so be quick! This is a first for Aberdeen & Scotland!

The sessions will start on Friday, September 7th & end on October 5th 2018 (4.30-6.30pm)

Participants must be:

  • Over 11 years of age
  • Live in Community Council areas of:
    • Aberdeen City Centre
    • Castlehill & Pittodrie
    • George Street

If you want to be in with a chance of joining us, send us an email to AwesomeTech@digital-maker.co.uk First Come, First Served.

youTube video uploads for Driverless Car R&D

We’ve uploaded 2 videos of the work we’ve done so far on preparing for the Driverless Car workshops we’re running soon.

We’ve documented the first “track” (Masking tape on the floor)

and then the black paper track + 2 different types of tape (for higher contrast).