Udacity's First Courses: Programming a Robotic Car

Classes start 20 Feb.

Note that the Stanford/Coursera classes scheduled for the middle of January have never started. After the initial big push for AI/DB/ML classes last fall, the two platforms and one independent company pioneering this generation of online classes have split. Now there are three or four platforms (Stanford, Knowlabs, Coursera, Udacity) and at least four companies involved, including the initial university sponsor.

On the plus side, there are also professors from at least three more universities promising to participate. And I really look forward to more experiences like the AI and ML classes I enjoyed. Thrun and Ng did great work. (I liked Norvig's ad hoc tutorials better than his class lecturing; now I want to dress like him, though.)

Finally I do have to wonder if the latest rounds of classes will ever kick off. Two weeks late with total radio silence from a startup project usually means that nothing but vapor will ever emit.

I'm looking forward to this course! For people who want to get their feet wet, check out David Singleton's awesome blog post: http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar

After reading that post, I made one of my own using Lego: http://slowping.com/2012/self-driving-lego-mindstorms-robot/

There is also a Nova documentary called "Great Robot Race" on the DARPA challenge to get the inspiration going: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/

If this isn't vapourware (see WildUtah's comment) then this could be really, really interesting. I'm hoping something comes out of it, because it's a fantastic field!

Somebody knows how they plan to make money? The whole idea is fantastic, I just hope they find a way to make it affordable in the future.