My Journey with DeepRacer

Anaheim

Watching my 2½-year-old son, Greyson, play in general, pick up things, and explore the world has reminded me of how curiosity is the engine of discovery. He sees things that most of us would not, like a single tiny ant crawling across the floor. That same curiosity brought all of us to AWS DeepRacer. Some of us jumped in because it’s a challenge, some because we’re interested in learning machine learning, and some because it’s a great way to learn by doing. I was in this for career and personal development.

In 2019, I started with the AWS DeepRacer Scholarship Challenge from Udacity. Through this DeepRacer experience, I learned about reinforcement learning within the field of machine learning. I was immediately hooked and became one of the community leaders in the DeepRacer space. AWS took notice of my support of the community, teaching new racers about Deepracing, and encouraged me to apply for the AWS Community Builders program. With every step up the ladder, this opportunity allowed me to uplevel my cloud knowledge and explore AWS services more intentionally. My crescendo was a new role in cloud-focused engineering.

Highlights were plentiful, such as commentating at Anthem’s AWS Summit and watching Nathan Liang one of the youngest in the league and not even out of high school break a world record. Still, our journey wasn’t just about watching others – I won two summits myself and had the surreal experience of breaking a world record at an AWS Summit race in DC. Only shortly after Chris Griffin beat my time at the London Summit taking the world record, But some of our greatest lessons came not from success, but from failure. Chris is a Senior Software Engineer from JPMC, and JP Morgan Chase seems to have some formula to make winners, what was so unfathomable to me at the time of my world record, was who I was racing against at the Summit. I was in for a shock during this time because who greeted me at the track that day was Sai Ram Naragoni the former champion from the 2021 season also known as JPMC-Rogue-Hyderabad. this was nerve-wracking going against a former champion leading by 3-tenths of the second until the first place was confirmed which I felt was impossible to hold, but this was the beauty of this competitive competition win or lose was sometimes on the razer’s edge.

AWS DC Summit


The most difficult moment of that year came on the first day of the Reinvent 2023 championships. I had to swallow that bitter taste of elimination in round 1 partly because of the racing format. I knew this day would be hard because we’re the world’s best at this point. However, I knew it wasn’t over and started training preparing for my Last chance race. There was hope I could get back into the top 32, but even if I lost; I still had something to be proud of because one of the top 32 was a student I had mentored in the Student League which was Patelaniket. In his first year transitioning from Student League to Deepracer League, he got to the top 32. I fought back in the Wild Card Last Chance Race and won one of only two slots available. I was positive about my victory here because only a few racers left to attempt their last chance. I climbed to 6th place in the top 8 from an early elimination. That moment was even sweeter because of the huge obstacles I had to overcome.

Wild Card Race

And to be honest, I look back on DeepRacer now and realize that it wasn’t really about the races, or even about winning or setting records. It was about the experience – dealing with the difficulties, persevering through the failures, growing through the journey. The program sparked a desire to learn, a curiosity to keep experimenting and improving, a motivation to push the boundaries, and a belief that the small adjustments, the model failures, and the breakthroughs are worth it.

As the DeepRacer League draws to a close, I feel like we’re closing a chapter. But the values it’s taught us – curiosity, resilience, continuous learning – will outlast it by a long shot. We didn’t just learn about machine learning – we learned how to approach things with a clear head, an open mind, and a desire to learn. And even as one round of this adventure comes to an end, the spirit of discovery lives on. The real victory is not in any given feat of learning – but in the growth that curiosity fosters and the thrill of knowing there’s always something new to try.

Revolutionizing Computer Science Education: The DeepRacer Autonomous Race Experience

🏎️ Why you need DeepRacer 🏁

Meet our CIOs

In the vibrant halls of South Hills High School, Chief Information Officers Denise and Sophie embarked on a mission to infuse the DeepRacer Autonomous Race with a sense of identity and purpose. Recognizing the importance of a memorable acronym to encapsulate the essence of the project, they dove headfirst into the creative process, determined to craft something that would capture the imagination of all who encountered it.

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DeepRacer-for-Cloud v5.2.2 now available with new real-time training metrics

grafana panel

DeepRacer-for-Cloud provides a great way for developers to train DeepRacer models on EC2 (or other cloud compute instances, or even local servers) however many users have noticed that unlike the official AWS console it didn’t provide the kind of friendly web UI showing the current state of training.

While there are some fantastic log analysis notebooks available these can be a little tricky to set up and often require re-loading vast amounts of log data to get a refreshed view of the metrics.

Deepracer-for-Cloud v5.2.2 is now available and has added an exciting new feature which enables real-time metrics visualisation using Grafana.

Update – This new functionality has now also been added to DeepRacer-on-the-Spot.

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The AWS ML community is moving to Discord

After five years of hosting our community on Slack, the AWS Machine Learning Community is moving to Discord.

Over the past years many people have joined and contributed to the community. People have shared countless tips & tricks and helped people with their ML and DeepRacer journey.

Why did we take his decision?

Slack has been at the core for the Community’s activity from day one of it existence. We would not get to where we are without it. Over the time, we have learned to leverage its strengths and live with limitations.

Over the past year we have noticed that more and more of this knowledge is disappearing due to Slack’s limited history, harming our ability to grow and sustain the community. This harms community engagement because many channels are empty by now. Slack also does not provide us with the tools we need to further grow and sustain the community.

What will happen to Slack?

Slack will stay around for a while, whilst we migrate to Discord. We will slowly reduce the number of available channels. Announcements made in our new Discord server will be relayed to Discord to ensure nobody misses a thing!

You will find our new home at join.deepracing.io

Thanks for being a member of this community, and we hope to see you again soon!

AWS DeepRacer activities in Buenos Aires (2023)

We were able to run many DeepRacer events in Buenos Aires in 2023; I thought about writing this article to describe how things were put together. The bottom line is that I wanted to gain experience in physical racing but needed a track. Many racers face the same problem, and I get asked how I did it. Finding a university and building a DeepRacer community around it was the solution for me.

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AWS DeepRacer Championships 2023: The format and the prizes

Time is running out for those who want to join the championships. With just over a week left to race in the League and 13 spots left for grabs the racing is getting increasingly tense. But then it’s worth remembering that we already have 57 finalists determined, and they are already waiting for the information on what’s ahead of them in Las Vegas.

Well, here’s what.

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