Autonomous Valet Parking Demonstration and Virtual Hack-a-thon (new date)

Autoware
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Hey Autoware (and ROS) community! If you haven’t met me before, I’m Josh Whitley, the System Architect for the Autoware Foundation. I wanted to get some new info out there regarding Autoware.Auto and our first live demonstration - Autonomous Valet Parking (AVP)! The dates have been chosen, the maps have been made, and the software is almost there - we just need your help to complete it! Here’s a run-down of the currently-planned dates and activities for the first Autoware.Auto Virtual Hack-a-thon and AVP Demo 2020:

  • September 18, 2020
    • Planned code freeze for major components (localization, planning, perception, control, and vehicle interface)
  • September 19 - 27, 2020
    • Integration work and on-vehicle testing/tuning
  • September 28 - October 1, 2020
    • Virtual Hack-a-thon
  • October 2, 2020
    • AVP Demo

Virtual Hack-a-thon (September 28 - October 1)

So, you’re probably asking yourself, “What’s a virtual hack-a-thon?” Well, the basic idea is that we want to give participating developers some heads-down time like any hack-a-thon but replace the in-person troubleshooting, development questions, and chat with as much online interaction as possible! Every day during the hack-a-thon, we will have (at least) one hour-long video chat with all interested participants. In addition, we’ll be hanging out on Autoware’s Slack (join channel #avp-hackathon once you’ve created your account here). Finally, we want to make sure that everything works as expected with both your contributions and our existing code so we’ll be live-streaming our in-vehicle testing! More details regarding the specific goals of the hack-a-thon and how to participate will be posted to this Discourse thread soon.

AVP 2020 Demo Day (October 2)

Due to our current, nasty global situation and the dangerous circumstances in California, we will be limiting the in-person participation at the Demo Day to only a few engineers and camera crew. However, I will be doing my best to keep the Slack channel updated on our progress, regardless of the outcome. Finally, after the day of demos and recording is over, the marketing team collaborating on the event will produce a nice marketing video that we’ll share with everyone.

We hope to see everyone online for the hack-a-thon and feel free to respond here or hit me up on Slack if you have questions!

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Welcome everyone to the 2020 AVP Virtual Hack-a-thon! Next week on 2020-09-29T05:00:00Z the hack-a-thon begins! So, what will we be working on?

Hack-a-thon Goals

The GUI and getting it to talk to ROS! In our current incarnation, we are using plugins in rviz2 to provide the initial location of the vehicle and the location of the goal pose. For the demo, we want to have a simple, web-based UI with buttons like “Drive to Parking Spot 1” and “Recall Vehicle” to make the experience more user-friendly. We put this task squarely in the hands of ROS developers in our AVP Hack-a-thon! We’ve set up this issue to track our progress toward our goals.

Communication

The Autoware Foundation will host daily video chats on Zoom to get everyone prepped and help with live trouble-shooting. Join the #avp-hackathon channel on the Autoware Slack to get the link and passcode. To accomodate world-wide participants, we have planned the first call for 2020-09-29T05:00:00Z (sorry for the time US participants) and they will repeat for all 4 days of the hack-a-thon. We hope to see you there! Additionally, I will be hosting live streams while testing in the car. These will generally be randomly distributed between 9 AM and 4 PM PDT and the link to each stream will be posted in the Slack channel.

We look forward to seeing everyone there! HAPPY HACKING!

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