No, you don't need a GPU at all. It helps, of course, but it not necessary. I don't remember the specs of the computer we used, but to give you an idea we give all the training data to undergrad students in the machine learning class (https://www.kaggle.com/c/mac0460-self-driving) they achieved good results with their personal laptop.
I did this project together with my colleague Paula (pksm here, @pksmoraes on Twitter). I am doing research on NLP, this was just one summer project for me. She will work on that project further. So yes, it is not dead! Submit a pull request if you like :)
Nice project and cool video! (our video is not so well produced :P). Our project was a summer project, we did it in this January. The evolution of the project will be something like yours, we didn't apply any object detection technique.
Yep, we hate Python 2 too!
But we develop the project in Python2 to use the library NXT-Python (the library responsible to control the Lego Mindstorms NXT). But, in our defense, w also have created a branch of the project using Python 3 :)