Ask HN: Self Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree

I haven't taken it, sounds interesting.

I did read a comment from someone who took it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12518725

They're very light. Since they don't carry any weight you'd at least hope to learn something. You'll get as much if not more from the free machine learning Georgia tech course with Tom Mitchell's book than the nanodegree. As a follow up, I took Thruns robotic driving course and it suffers from being a purely software course. There are optional hardware projects but no imparted hardware instruction. So I'd be especially leery of an automated driving nanodegree degree online.

Seems like a good way to break into the field. I was accepted too and looked through the released syllabus after digging around a bit -- they do a good job integrating computer vision, sensor fusion, and path planning. They have some cool perks like being able to run your code on a car and running driving simulations. I don't think it will get you to a job by any means -- at most an internship. It does seem like a good foundation to have for jumping into more advanced topics though.

Hi all,

My name is Dhruv (dhruv@udacity.com) and I lead the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program here at Udacity. I'm happy to answer questions directly on this note (email me!). I think this program will be very different from our existing Nanodegrees as we have real industry partners who are extremely invested in making sure the program is high quality from the get go. This is because they want to be able to increase their hiring pipelines as soon as possible. We've been determining what projects/content to create by asking our hiring partners (and Sebastian Thrun) what they would want to see in a portfolio of someone they hire. We then work back from there and iterate to create the content. So far, folks at Mercedes-Benz, Otto, NVIDIA, and a few other auto companies have gone over our syllabus, given us feedback, and helped us iterate. I'm trying my hardest to make this program something I would myself take to get into the field or learn more about it(I'm an Engineer by trade who moved into this role!).

I was accepted. I am most interested in spending a long time (9 months) learning about autonomous systems. I also like that a single autonomous system, a self-driving car, is the focus. I think this will be more valuable for my learning style than a more academic machine learning course which might tackle many applications, which are probably already mature solutions. I like that self-driving cars are a newer application and the course might actually push the state of the art.

As a more esoteric bonus I'm evaluating this kind of learning as a potential replacement for higher education for any children I might have, given ever-increasing costs for brick-and-mortar universities.

In the foreseeable future we will not. However, our hope is to do that eventually (probably at least half a year away) as we do with all our content.