This repository contains all my code used to complete the final project for the Localization course in Udacity's Self-Driving Car Nanodegree.

Your robot has been kidnapped and transported to a new location! Luckily it has a map of this location, a (noisy) GPS estimate of its initial location, and lots of (noisy) sensor and control data.

In this project a 2 dimensional particle filter is implemented in C++. The particle filter is given a map and some initial localization information (analogous to what a GPS would provide). At each time step the filter is also getting observation and control data.

This project involves the Term 2 Simulator which can be downloaded here

MAKE SURE TO USE THE LATEST VERSION OF THE SIMULATOR!

This repository includes two files that can be used to set up and intall uWebSocketIO for either Linux or Mac systems. For windows you can use either Docker, VMware, or even Windows 10 Bash on Ubuntu to install uWebSocketIO.

Once the install for uWebSocketIO is complete, the main program can be built and ran by doing the following from the project top directory.

mkdir build cd build cmake .. make ./particle_filter

Here is the main protcol that main.cpp uses for uWebSocketIO in communicating with the simulator.

INPUT: values provided by the simulator to the c++ program

// sense noisy position data from the simulator

["sense_x"]

["sense_y"]

["sense_theta"]

// get the previous velocity and yaw rate to predict the particle's transitioned state

["previous_velocity"]

["previous_yawrate"]

// receive noisy observation data from the simulator, in a respective list of x/y values

["sense_observations_x"]

["sense_observations_y"]

OUTPUT: values provided by the c++ program to the simulator

// best particle values used for calculating the error evaluation

["best_particle_x"]

["best_particle_y"]

["best_particle_theta"]

//Optional message data used for debugging particle's sensing and associations

// for respective (x,y) sensed positions ID label

["best_particle_associations"]

// for respective (x,y) sensed positions

["best_particle_sense_x"] <= list of sensed x positions

["best_particle_sense_y"] <= list of sensed y positions

The directory structure of this repository is as follows:

root
|   build.sh
|   clean.sh
|   CMakeLists.txt
|   README.md
|   run.sh
|
|___data
|   |   
|   |   map_data.txt
|   
|   
|___src
    |   helper_functions.h
    |   main.cpp
    |   map.h
    |   particle_filter.cpp
    |   particle_filter.h

You can find the inputs to the particle filter in the data directory.

map_data.txt includes the position of landmarks (in meters) on an arbitrary Cartesian coordinate system. Each row has three columns

1. x position
2. y position
3. landmark id

• Map data provided by 3D Mapping Solutions GmbH.

If your particle filter passes the current grading code in the simulator (you can make sure you have the current version at any time by doing a git pull), then you should pass!

The things the grading code is looking for are:

1. Accuracy: the particle filter should localize vehicle position and yaw to within the values specified in the parameters max_translation_error and max_yaw_error in src/main.cpp.

2. Performance: the particle filter should complete execution within the time of 100 seconds.