Introducing autonomous vehicles into an unergraduate engineering course

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are of great interest for the automotive industry and are expected to revolutionize mobility and public transportation. The university can contribute to the design and development of autonomous vehicles both in the field of teaching and in research and technology transfer. In this paper, it is described how this topic is introduced in an undergraduate engineering course, “Implementation of Automatic Control Systems (IACS)”. The IACS course is based on project based learning (PBL) and learning by doing methodologies. Several practical examples that correspond to real automatic systems are discussed throughout the course and one of them, a low-cost AV to which a Raspberry pi has been adapted, forms the basis for a final project of the course. The control algorithms are developed on MATLAB/SIMULINK and are sent to the Raspberry through a wireless communication network. The control objective of the system is the automatic guidance of the vehicle through a single lane indoor closed circuit, the detection and identification of different traffic signals and the automatic response to these signals. Students check the behavior of the vehicle and proceed to make improvements. Based on the assessment of the students and the robustness of the autonomous vehicles, it is time to consolidate this type of project within the course. Students that want to get deeper into the matter have the opportunity to do a final degree project related with the AV.