Follow me on this exciting journey to dive into the world of robotics and artificial intelligence, through understanding the application of self-driving cars. Chapter 1 — Overview: Why self-driving cars are the future, and how did we get here? Why Self-Driving Cars: From Horseless to Driverless An Introduction of Self-Driving Cars (Part 1)medium.com Chapter 2 — HD Mapping: How to build maps as the…

A short reflection on my time in the tech capital of the world — When I first moved to the Bay Area, I told myself I would move back to NY in two years. Fast forward half a decade later, here I am still in San Francisco. I’ve moved jobs, built meaningful relationships, and finally made friends with the fog. I’m still one of…

The happiest and healthiest I’ve been — “Life taught me love is risky. Death taught me to love even more.” — Maxime Lagacé This week, I turned 28. I’m the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been — mentally, physically, and emotionally. What this state of happy and healthy really means is a deep sense of completion, peace…

A brief overview of hard and soft real-time systems — Working in the field of autonomous systems this past couple of years has got me mesmerized over this tiny-huge world called Operating System. To be more specific, it’s the application of a real-time operating system — mainly characterized by predictability and determinism — that I want to zoom in more…

A General Framework for Perception — an Introduction to Self-Driving Cars (Part 5) — In previous part of the Introduction to Self-Driving Car series, we discussed a core visual functionality of perception stack in an autonomous vehicle (AV): computer vision. In it we focused on perception sensing that involves data collection from vehicle sensors and the processing of this data into an understanding of…

An Introduction to Self-Driving Cars (Part 4) — One of the things I enjoy the most in learning about self-driving cars is simply realizing how much resemblance a set of computing machines could bear to our human body. A part that stood out to me is perception, as it takes after many of the visual functionalities in our…

An Introduction to Self-Driving Cars (Part 3) — Previously, we discussed about why self-driving car is the future and how we got here today by looking at the history of transportation. We then dove into the backbone of self-driving software itself: how to build an HD mapping, in the second…

On HD Mapping — an Introduction to Self-Driving Cars (Part 2) — The ability to get from one place to another, anywhere in the country, is one of the most remarkable gifts of our modern technology. Maps represent the real world on a much smaller scale. They help us travel from one location to another. They help us organize information when we…

The Evolution from Horseless to Driverless — An Introduction to Self-Driving Cars (Part 1) — When my team and I first launched the Tesla Full Self-Driving beta release last year, I had never felt so close to our customers and the range of experiences they encountered when trying out our product for the first time. Working alongside engineers who cared and fought so hard for…