Herbie: Autonomous Person-Following Car

I’ll be presenting Herbie, a kids ride on car converted to look like the Herbie beetle car from the old movie. Its an autonomous sidewalk vehicle built on NVIDIA Jetson that follows people. The project combines classical computer vision (OpenCV and YOLO v11) with real-time control logic to enable vision-only navigation. I’ll walk through the hardware stack, perception pipeline, control challenges at higher speeds, and how I’m exploring learned models for smoother trajectory control.