Development of a 3-Credit Multidisciplinary University Autonomous Vehicles Course Without Prerequisites and Open to Any Major

Autonomous vehicle technology has tremendous potential for revolutionizing the current transportation industry.Companies and investors are funding a staggering amount of development, leading to a large number of high paying jobs that require new skills.But the traditional university engineering education model has not kept up with demand as evidenced by the popularity of Udacity, Udemy, and other massive open online courses.A new paradigm of multidisciplinary education is needed to meet learner and industry demand.To begin to address this need, this paper proposes a starting point for the design of a multidisciplinary 3-credit Autonomous Vehicle Engineering university course based on our experience from 3 previous course offerings.First, we discuss how the course evolved from the first to third offering.Specifically how the course was intentionally developed to include practical applications of industry-standard writing and to center student learning with regular feedback and practice.Next, we break down the core concepts for autonomous vehicle engineering across engineering and computer science disciplines.We address the issue of prerequisites and how the class concepts were ultimately organized and how existing university research and computer labs were utilized.Lastly, we also discuss group dynamics and techniques for ensuring course project teams have diverse majors.Our results section is primarily composed of survey results from our third course offering.We show the evolution of skills from the mechanical engineering students and the computer science students over the course of the class.For example, the computer science students typically have no controls experience, and this skill will (hopefully) have improved by the end.Lastly, we show overall grade trends in the course and qualitative information on final project complexity as the course has evolved.Our conclusion is that this proposed framework has potential to begin to address the university shortcoming of autonomous vehicle engineering education.Overall, this paper provides a perspective for educators and academic policymakers to acquire insights into how to develop an autonomous vehicle engineering course.Future work includes developing a blueprint for an autonomous vehicle certification program composed of several courses.