Monday, 21. September 2015, Project Kickoff

Today we had the project kickoff of our Challenge Project. Wolfgang Giersche from zühlke introduced us to the challenge. See the presentation slides here.

The Challenge

Implement an autopilot for 'carrera' track:

Carrera track

The algorithm should analyse the track and then learn how to drive with maximal possible speed.

Technology

The Starter-Kit is implemented with Java and Akka, therefore we will also use these technologies.

Links

We should study/google the following buzzwords for better understanding of the project, if we dont already know them:

  • real time event processing
  • maching learning
  • microservices
  • internet of things
  • reactive programming
  • data analytics
  • Spring Framework
  • Akka

First steps

The first 'little' (more or less) step today was to get the starter-kit running on our machines.

Requirements:

  • maven
  • jdk8
  • rabbitmq-server

Basically the starter-kit can be cloned from https://github.com/FastAndFurious/AkkaStarterKit and then built with mvn clean install. (snapshots of 'fnf.clientapi' and 'fnf.simulib' in local maven repo is required) After overcoming some barriers with the simulator-gui, it worked.

Reminder / TODO: Some points are not very nice, I think we have to improve these things. For example I dont want to checkout some dependencies and build local snapshots to make a project running. Such dependencies should be binary. Unfortunately there is no release with the current sources in the repository. I think we will setup our own CI (Jenkins) and artifact repository.

At the end we set up our github repositories and finished the day.

Summary

The project sounds very exciting but also very challenging. Maybe thats why it is called 'challenge' project. :D There are a lot of interesting concepts and technologies we do not know yet.

This will be a lot of work, I think... I hope we will also have some fun with it :-)