
AWS DeepRacer League - jeffbarr
https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/league/
======
TheEnder8
I got a DeepRacer car at Reinvent, but three months later I still can't use it
:(

Access to the DeepRacer section of the AWS console hasn't been made public,
and I don't think there's any other way to program it.

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hedgehog
It's cool that they are making a more packaged product. For a more hackable
setup the original Donkey Car setup is pretty good and available now:

[http://www.donkeycar.com](http://www.donkeycar.com)

~~~
mtw
Of interest , the DeepRacer does reinforcement learning while donkeycar has a
completely different approach (supervised learning). It would be interesting
to see them compete

~~~
FIN_Master
Donkeycar is open source and modular by design, so nothing prevents using
reinforcement learning. People are going there already.

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JimmyAustin
This is incredibly cool, and I'd love to enter, but despite having one of the
races in Sydney, the actual DeepRacer hardware doesn't ship outside of the
United States. Baffling from a company that has a local presence in Australia.

If anyone from AWS is reading, I'd love to buy one!

~~~
cr0sh
Any idea if you can enter your own homebrew system? I mean, the hardware
listed isn't really all that special. You could probably take this:

[https://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/](https://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/)

Slap it on new-ish Samsung or Apple phone, coupled to a cheap-ish RC car...

That'd probably get you 80% of the way; also, check out NVidia's "End-to-End"
self-driving vehicle paper:

[https://images.nvidia.com/content/tegra/automotive/images/20...](https://images.nvidia.com/content/tegra/automotive/images/2016/solutions/pdf/end-
to-end-dl-using-px.pdf)

I built a tensorflow model from that trained on a 750 TI for the Udacity Self-
Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree (it was part of the course to build such a
thing that ran on a virtual track), and after training it did quite well - at
least on a virtual track.

A few tweaks to the model, maybe using the TensorFlowLite package or something
on the phone - probably work fine for 99.9% of the runs...

~~~
JimmyAustin
I actually completed the Udacity SDC course as well and implemented the same
Nvidia NN.

I looked into building my own implementation, but decided against it. I'm not
particularly interested in the hardware, just the algorithms that drive it,
and the amount of time spent getting the hardware working (not to mention a
simulator ) would have been nontrivial.

Perhaps I'll grab a Donkey.

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mhh__
Is it hotlapping or a race? One is a lot easier than the other as evidenced by
codemasters's valiant attempts to write AI over the last few years.

Also, it looks like they don't know the track beforehand but they seem to be
taking absolutely bizarre lines through bends (Or is that an artifact of the
model used?)

~~~
applecrazy
This is hotlapping, it seems. A race would be cooler.

~~~
itronitron
you might be interested in marble racing, it is very exciting and uses much
less energy

~~~
applecrazy
Correct. But you don’t get the RL/ML/DL experience out of it.

~~~
itronitron
True, but once self-automated racing cars are a solved thing, marble racing
will still be more interesting to watch.

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jcims
Would be nice if there was a program to get these into high schools to
bootstrap a more software oriented robotics option.

Also a decent quality five or six DOF arm option instead of the racer might be
interesting. Just dont call it DeepGripper.

~~~
dtrailin
There is already FIRST robotics competitions for that. FIRST tech league in
particular is pretty software oriented. There programs are a great way to get
students into programming and learning about writing real software.

~~~
jcims
Wasn’t aware of tech league. My daughter tried FIRST a few years back and it
was way more hardware/build oriented which kind of killed her interest.

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xiaodai
They dont even ship to australia but they have a Sydney event?

~~~
Bedon292
There are a bunch of events before they actually ship. They gave a bunch of
them out at this past year's re:Invent, so I guess only those people who got
them can participate until then.

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syntaxing
Udacity SDC alum here as well and this looks awesome. I'm tempted to buy one
after reading about DIYRoboCars. I've been thinking about porting openpilot to
my Jetson TX2 but have been reluctant since I have no way to test it.
DeepRacer seems much funner and safer. I wonder how hackable the car will be.
How hard would it be to set up a remote ROS nodes rather using AWS services?

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m3kw9
Amazon gets to keep the winners models?

~~~
sarvind
The models should be limited to within the confines of the s3 location you
specify (and the physical deepracer device) unless you explicitly permit
otherwise. Nothing that I see in the terms of use [0] cover access to the
model.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/device-terms-of-
use/](https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/device-terms-of-use/)

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pixelHD
Now that nvidia has released a cheaper jetson board, I'm really itching to get
it and build a small RL car. Training on the device would be out of the
question though.

Anyone know of any successful DIY small RL cars?

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dtrailin
It's not clear to me why deep learning is required here. It seems like some
dead simple lane following code would probably work just fine. This is
generally how these competitions are done.

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maccam912
I got a deep racer at Re:invent but I'm still waiting to get into the preview
to play with it. Anyone from AWS cruising the comments here who might be able
to enable it for my account?

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ralusek
This is that weird future shit I was hoping would start to happen.

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turtlegrids
darn. the window for $249 deepracer is over? Still mentioned as $249
'introductory discount' at
[https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/pricing/)
but upon clicking through to Amazon.com it's $399 now.

~~~
richardw
My reading is that pre-order is more expensive than launch price. "Can" vs
"will be"?

"You can pre-order your AWS DeepRacer car on Amazon.com for $399. For a
limited time at launch AWS DeepRacer will be available at an introductory
discount price of $249."

~~~
turtlegrids
It was previously $249 on Amazon.com. It's now $399. Not sure how to make it
any more clear.

~~~
JimmyAustin
I think he is confused by "Launch of pre-orders" vs "Launch of the product".
It's an easy mistake to make.

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doctorstupid
Must the training be done in their cloud?

~~~
sarvind
You require AWS to at least activate and set up DeepRacer [0].

You don't strictly speaking need the cloud for training a DeepRacer model,
although cloud access (via the DeepRacer console) could be the path of least
friction.

Much of the source code for training DeepRacer on AWS can be found on the
amazon-sagemaker-examples github repo [1].

The sample training environment relies on Gazebo [2] which, while freely
available, has a managed AWS offering [3]. But ultimately, you should just be
able to deploy an RL Coach model to the device [4].

[0]
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/deepracer/latest/developerguide/...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/deepracer/latest/developerguide/deploy-
deepracer-project.html)

[1] [https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-sagemaker-
examples/tree/ma...](https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-sagemaker-
examples/tree/master/reinforcement_learning/rl_deepracer_robomaker_coach_gazebo)

[2] [http://gazebosim.org/](http://gazebosim.org/)

[3]
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/robomaker/latest/dg/simulation-t...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/robomaker/latest/dg/simulation-
tools-gazebo.html)

[4]
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/deepracer/latest/developerguide/...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/deepracer/latest/developerguide/deepracer-
drive-your-vehicle.html#deepracer-drive-vehicle-autonomously)

------
sdan
Why is the age limit 18?

~~~
taneq
For some reason most robotics contests seem to be restricted to highschool
students. It's bizarre. It's like "Hey kids get into STEM because robots are
cool! OK now stop and go build accounting software."

Edit: Thinking more about it, it's even worse. "Hey kids, robotics is a toy
for kids to play with."

~~~
chucksmash
I think a big part of it is because as an adult with the time, inclination,
some money, and programming skills you're expected to just go off and build
things.

I guess the same holds true for other adult things like paint-and-sips (you
drink and paint a picture) though, so maybe you've come across an untapped
market for bot-and-booze.

~~~
sdan
Yeah, generally that's true. I think I may be a different case
([https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.08233](https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.08233)).

~~~
applecrazy
Nice to see another high school student here!

Just wanted to compliment you on your self-driving car design. Also skimmed
your blog and paper. My intended area of focus is generative modeling but I
thought your project was awesome nonetheless.

