Instill Autonomous Driving Technology into Undergraduates via Project-Based Learning

Autonomous driving is seeing fast-growing development in recent years. In order to broaden the current generation’s career pathways to this cutting-edge field, it is necessary to instill autonomous driving technology to our STEM students, who are not majoring in automotive engineering. This work-in-progress paper presents an underway new exploration to nurture undergraduate students with autonomous driving knowledge through a comprehensive hands-on program using the project-based learning pedagogy. Students in different groups will collaborate and exploit their problem-solving skills by developing a 1/10-scale autonomous vehicle on a scaleddown driving platform. The vehicle is configured with three main functions: pre-collision detection, lane tracking, and road sign recognition. Hardware and software systems of this autonomous vehicle are described in this paper. In the preliminary results, we present a developed vehicle that will be used to testify the functions of the hardware system and verify the feasibility of the proposed on-road applications. Future work of this project is also discussed.