This repository contains all the code needed 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 you will implement a 2 dimensional particle filter in C++. Your particle filter will be given a map and some initial localization information (analogous to what a GPS would provide). At each time step your filter will also get observation and control data.

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

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.

1. mkdir build
2. cd build
3. cmake ..
4. make
5. ./particle_filter

Alternatively some scripts have been included to streamline this process, these can be leveraged by executing the following in the top directory of the project:

1. ./clean.sh
2. ./build.sh
3. ./run.sh

Tips for setting up your environment can be found here

Note that the programs that need to be written to accomplish the project are src/particle_filter.cpp, and particle_filter.h

The program main.cpp has already been filled out, but feel free to modify it.

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

Your job is to build out the methods in particle_filter.cpp until the simulator output says:

Success! Your particle filter passed!

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

The only file you should modify is particle_filter.cpp in the src directory. The file contains the scaffolding of a ParticleFilter class and some associated methods. Read through the code, the comments, and the header file particle_filter.h to get a sense for what this code is expected to do.

If you are interested, take a look at src/main.cpp as well. This file contains the code that will actually be running your particle filter and calling the associated methods.

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.

• Initialization - estimate position from noisy GPS and create a number of particles to represent vehicle position
• Prediction - predict where each particle would move to given our control input (the movement commands we're sending to the vehicle)
• Update weights - calculate each particles likelihood of being correct by matching each observation with a known landmark from the map
• Resample - use the likelihoods calculated in the update weight step to create a new set of particles that are closer to the most likely positions