README.md

Self Driving Car Demo

Overview

A project that trains a virtual car to how to move an object around a screen (drive itself) without running into obstacles using a type of reinforcement learning called Q-Learning. More information can be found on the writeup about this project in part 1, part 2, and part 3. This the code for 'Build an Self Driving Car in 5 Min' on Youtube

Dependencies

• Numpy (http://www.numpy.org/)
• Pygame. I used these instructions: http://askubuntu.com/questions/401342/how-to-download-pygame-in-python3-3 but with pip3 install hg+http://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame after I installed the dependencies
• Pymunk. Use Pymunk 4. Using version 5 will not work as it was a major refactor. V4 is here
• Keras pip3 install keras
• Theanos pip3 install git+git://github.com/Theano/Theano.git --upgrade --no-deps
• h5py pip3 install h5py

Use pip to install any missing dependencies

Basic Usage

1. Update pymunk to python3 by CDing into its directory and running 2to3 -w *.py

2. First, you need to train a model. This will save weights to the saved-models folder. You may need to create this folder before running. You can train the model by running python3 learning.py It can take anywhere from an hour to 36 hours to train a model, depending on the complexity of the network and the size of your sample. However, it will spit out weights every 25,000 frames, so you can move on to the next step in much less time.

3. Edit the nn.py file to change the path name for the model you want to load. Sorry about this, I know it should be a command line argument. Then, watch the car drive itself around the obstacles! Run python3 playing.py

4. Once you have a bunch of CSV files created via the learning, you can convert those into graphs by running: python3 plotting.py

This will also spit out a bunch of loss and distance averages at the different parameters. That's it!

Credits

Credit for the vast majority of code here goes to Harvitronix. I've merely created a wrapper around all of the important functions to get people started. Below are a few sources he cited.

• Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602.pdf
• Deep learning to play Atari games: https://github.com/spragunr/deep_q_rl
• Another deep learning project for video games: https://github.com/asrivat1/DeepLearningVideoGames
• A great tutorial on reinforcement learning that a lot of my project is based on: http://outlace.com/Reinforcement-Learning-Part-3/