Autonomous Vehicles: A Culminating Design Experience Doran Wilde, James Archibald, D.J. Lee, and Spencer Fowers Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA Abstract - We describe a senior design project in which teams of students design and implement the hardware and software modules that allow an off-the-shelf RC vehicle to operate autonomously using only on-board vision, sensors and computational resources. Projects involving autonomous robots are ideally suited as culminating design experiences because of the technical challenges of creating vision, control, and communication subsystems that meet desired performance metrics and that can be integrated into a working system. While the details of the required vehicle behavior are changed over time in our project, the scope is always such that a multidisciplinary team is required to complete it. We describe the hardware resources required for the project. We also describe the structure of our course and the technical details of the current project in which a custom laser-tag module is used to allow the autonomous agents to play a simplified version of capture-the-flag. Keywords: senior project, capstone, autonomous vehicles 1 Senior Project Format To graduate from BYU’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, each student is required to complete a one-semester, 4 credit hour senior project course. In any given semester, multiple sections of the class are offered, each focusing on a different technical project and advised by different members of the faculty. Project offerings vary over time, based on faculty interests. All projects offered in the same semester share a project management track that focuses on a systematic design process, teamwork, and presentation and writing skills. Within our degree programs, these senior projects satisfy the ABET requirement of a “major design experience based on the knowledge and skills acquired in earlier course work and incorporating appropriate engineering standards and multiple realistic constraints” [1]. Each project option is associated with a different set of prerequisite junior- and senior-level courses. To complete projects successfully, knowledge from a variety of sub- disciplines must be applied and integrated. Moreover, projects are much too ambitious in scope to be completed by any single student working alone. Thus, teamwork is essential in completing each project – both in ensuring that each team has one or more individuals with the requisite background in each critical area, and in providing sufficient human resources to do the work. The senior project course is unique in our curriculum in its emphasis on teamwork and its structure around teams: all assignments are completed by teams rather than individuals, and – with very few exceptions – all members of each team receive the same grade for the class. For our senior project, it is essential that each team have expertise in real-time software, embedded system hardware, and control systems. Thus, each team must have at least one individual who has completed a specified prerequisite course in each area, as well as one student to be the team leader who coordinates team efforts and provides reports to the faculty advisors. Teams are formed the very first day of class, and the first team-based assignments are given right away, for both the technical and project management tracks. Students often attend the first day with pre-formed teams; in general, we try to let people work together when they want to, although we sometimes have to adjust team rosters to ensure that every team has all areas of expertise covered. After teams are formed, they operate independently. The successful completion of the project described in this paper also requires technical components that are not addressed in any of the prerequisite courses, and so students have to master new material – as is typical of real-world engineering projects. For our project, the major challenges of this type are in the areas of computer vision and system integration. Essential background for these topics is provided through both lectures and online tutorials. Throughout the semester, team assignments associated with the project management track focus on the creation of formal documents that constitute a portfolio describing their design. Teams also have monthly design reviews attended by instructors, teaching assistants, and project sponsors. Teams cannot attend each other’s design reviews, so details of creative design and playing strategy can be freely shared without fear that proprietary ideas will be made public. Using the Trac open source project management system [2], each team creates web pages as a repository for their design documents and software. These are password-protected to limit access to only team members during the semester, but they are made available to the general public (and hence future teams) at the end of the semester. Through their experiences in this senior project course, students learn a great deal about the challenges of managing an engineering design project with an aggressive schedule and a non- negotiable deadline for final completion. Over the years, faculty members have created and advised a wide variety of technical projects. Examples of projects include free-space optical communications, software-defined radios, mobile ad-hoc sensor networks, and autonomous mini- UAVs. Some of these projects were defined in partnership