Hyundai Elantra Becomes Autonomous Using OnePlus 7T

Bengaluru-based developer Mankaran Singh recently posted a video showing a person in the US converting his Hyundai Elantra into an autonomous vehicle using a OnePlus 7T. “So soothing to watch. Flowpilot running on a One Plus 7T, by paper @ flowpilot discord,” he posted on X.

Last year, Singh converted his modified Maruti Alto K10 into an autonomous vehicle using a second-hand Redmi Note 9 Pro. This was made possible with the help of Flowpilot, an open-source driver assistance system he created as part of his passion project, Flow Drive.

Flowpilot is an open-source fork of Comma.ai’s OpenPilot that can run on most Windows/Linux and Android-powered machines.

In an exclusive interview with AIM, Singh said that he didn’t train driving models on his own; instead, he used learning models from Comma.ai because one needs tonnes of data to train models and require millions of dollars for compute clusters to train them.

The idea to start this initiative stems from George Hotz, the founder of Comma.ai, which is also into enabling autonomous vehicles with the help of smartphones and other proprietary devices.

Flowpilot performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Automated Lane Centering (ALC), Forward Collision Warning (FCW), Lane Departure Warning (LDW), and Driver Monitoring (DM) for a growing variety of supported car makes, models, and model years maintained by the community.

It records data from road-facing cameras, CAN, GPS, IMU, magnetometer, thermal sensors, crashes, and operating system logs. “All you need is basically actuators, the controller steering and gas brakes to control the car. And if you have that, Flowpilot can essentially run on anything,” said Singh.

“It supports all the phones (Android) that have OpenCL supporting them. That’s basically the GPU drivers, which are used for image processing, like neural networks, exhibiting neural networks,” he added.

Singh said that the quality of the experience definitely depends on the phone you use. “Mostly, if you’re using a phone that costs around 20-25K, that’s enough to run Flowpilot for reasonable performance, but anything less powerful, it’s going to lag, and the system will just show a warning; it just won’t engage,” he explained.

Flowpilot supports over 200 cars, including brands such as Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan, Kia, Chrysler, Lexus, Acura, Audi, VW, and more. Even if a car is not supported but has adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assist, it will likely be able to run Flowpilot.

However, Singh said that it does not support cars in India as of now. “In India, none of the cars are supported in a plug-and-play fashion. The only reason people use Flowpilot is because it’s far better than the stock system of the car,” he said.

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