If anyone from AWS is reading, I'd love to buy one!
https://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/
Slap it on new-ish Samsung or Apple phone, coupled to a cheap-ish RC car...
That'd probably get you 80% of the way; also, check out NVidia's "End-to-End" self-driving vehicle paper:
https://images.nvidia.com/content/tegra/automotive/images/20...
I built a tensorflow model from that trained on a 750 TI for the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree (it was part of the course to build such a thing that ran on a virtual track), and after training it did quite well - at least on a virtual track.
A few tweaks to the model, maybe using the TensorFlowLite package or something on the phone - probably work fine for 99.9% of the runs...
I looked into building my own implementation, but decided against it. I'm not particularly interested in the hardware, just the algorithms that drive it, and the amount of time spent getting the hardware working (not to mention a simulator ) would have been nontrivial.
Perhaps I'll grab a Donkey.
The whole idea of the competition would be to use the same hardware so it's a level playing field from a hardware perspective which turns it into a software competition, right?