Autonomous Vehicles: A Hands-On Interdisciplinary Freshman Course

The authors have recently developed a new first-semester freshman elective, Autonomous Vehicles, as a hands-on interdisciplinary introduction to mechanical, chemical, electrical, and computer engineering, computer science, design, controls, and energy. Course goals include exposing students to many facets of engineering and computer science to aid in major choice, developing practical technical skills relevant to subsequent projects, generating enthusiasm for future studies, and developing teamwork, design, presentation, and technical writing skills. Through a series of labs including drawing and 3D printing a robot chassis, soldering a microcontroller circuit board, assembling a gear box, building sensor circuits, machining and characterizing hydrogen proton exchange membranes (PEM) fuel cells, C programming, and generating and detecting Gold codes, the students design, build, test, and optimize robots to compete in a “Capture the Flag” style game. This paper will describe the course content and summarize assessment results from the Fall 2010 pilot course.