Autonomous self-driving vehicles - Design of professional laboratory exercises in the field of automotive mechatronics

Self-driving cars are gradually making their way into road traffic and represent the main component of the new form of mobility. Major companies such as Tesla, Google, and Uber are researching the continuous improvement of self-driving vehicles and their reliability. Therefore, it is of great interest for trained professionals to deal with and understand the principles and requirements for autonomous driving. This paper aims to describe the new concept of a Bachelor / Master level university course for automotive technology students to address new mobility and self-driving cars. For the practice-oriented course, hardware in a low budget range (US 80) was used, which nevertheless has all the necessary sensors and requirements for a comprehensive practical introduction to the topic of self-driving automotive technology. The modular structure of the course contains lectures and exercises on the following topics: The first Exercise deals with the construction and modification of the Car-Kit, followed by the setup of the used Raspberry Pi. Since the car kit and Raspberry Pi are ready to use, the third exercise will steer the car remotely. The autonomous lane lectures and exercises follow this navigation with color spaces and masking, the Canny edge detection, Hough transform, steering, and stabilization.