Open Source Apollo Self-Driving Platform Now As Free Online Course On Udacity

How do you succeed in getting into one of the hottest engineering topics of this century, the development of autonomous cars? By being lucky enough to be placed with one of the dozens of self-driving technology companies that train you, or by attending a course on the subject. Traditional universities do not yet offer such courses, but the online learning platform Udacity does, and even several courses of them.

Already in 2011 the founder of Udacity, Sebastian Thrun, had hired AI for Robots as one of the first courses, and nobody was more competent than him. Thrun and his team won the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous driving representing Stanford in 2005. As a result, the Google founders Brin and Page hired him to develop autonomous cars. The result is Waymo, today’s leading developer of autonomous cars.

The next Udacity Nanodegree for self-driving cars a few years later gave thousands of engineers around the world the opportunity to learn the ropes in a nine-month course.

Even before the turn of the year, Udacity and the Chinese Internet giant Baidu have launched a free course that will bring Baidu’s open source platform for autonomous driving Apollo closer to those who are willing to learn. Here is a video with a short introduction:

This article was also published in German.