1 - Start: What We're Building ~4 mins
Today you are coding in Scratch. You will build an autonomous car that senses the track and steers by itself.
You can already make sprites move and respond to events. Today you will use sensing and decisions so the car follows a track without you steering every turn.
Before you run anything, think: what might the car need to notice so it can stay on the road?
2 - How an Autonomous Car Works ~2 mins
What is an autonomous car?
An autonomous car (also known as a driverless car, self-driving car or robotic car) is a car that is capable of sensing what is around it and navigating without a person driving.
How does it work?
Autonomous cars use a variety of techniques to detect their surroundings, such as radar, laser light, GPS, odometry and computer vision. They have advanced control systems that interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage.
The following 2 minute video shows some of the different cameras that a Tesla autonomous car uses to sense where the road is and all the different objects that it comes close to such as people and other cars.
3 - Create a New Scratch Project ~2 mins
Let's program our own autonomous car! First, create a new Scratch project and delete the cat sprite.
4 - Add the Car Sprite ~2 mins
Included with this step is a car picture that we're going to upload into our Scratch project. First download the picture file onto your computer and then upload it into your project.
5 - Shrink the Car ~2 mins
As the car sprite is very large, we'll need to shrink it so that it has room to move around. We're going to shrink it to 10% of it's original size.
Add the following code to the car sprite:
when green flag clicked
set size to (10) %
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Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is available for free at https://scratch.mit.edu