Some other toy-scale self-driving car projects which come with simulators in case someone cannot get the hardware:

1. Duckietown: https://www.duckietown.org/ from ETH Zurich, comes with a MOOC with all material.

2. MuSHR: https://mushr.io/ from Sid Srinivasa’s group at UW.

3. F1TENTH: https://f1tenth.org/ probably the most popular, regularly heads physical competitions, sometimes at popular robotics conferences.

There’s Amazon DeepRacer too (https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/) but haven’t heard anyone talk about it recently - imo it feels like a ‘AWS can handle RL for robotics’ project.

As any other robotics research areas, there’s too many projects trying to do the same thing. There are many reasons for this, although thankfully the community is converging to common hardware when cheap, high quality option is available to buy commercially.