Notes

TORCS is a highly portable multi-platform car racing simulation which is used as a research platform. It includes a sophisticated physical model and supports all kinds of input devices ranging from steering wheels, over joysticks to game pads and much more. Due to its open design and accessibility it perfectly fits the requirements for the project.\
For our project we modified the screen capturing mode so that it would not only save images but also the corresponding steering angle. In addition, to simplify importing the data into tensor flow we changed the file format from PNG to BIN. Now both images and steering angle are saved into one binary file. The directory where the file is saved and the screen capturing rate can normally be specified in a XML file. However, for some reason this file could not be read by TORCS. Therefore, we had to hard-code both. The images are saved in "C:/Capture" and a capture rate of 5 Hz is used.\
To save time we used a driving-bot which keeps the car centered on the road. This also improves the quality of the collected data as all images are captured in the middle of the road. The images are captured with a resolution of 320x200.