Autonomous driving is the future of individual mobility and all major manufacturers are working on fully autonomous vehicles. While there are robust and good solutions for the individual problems in autonomous driving, the main challenge lies in their integration. Altogether, an autonomous vehicle’s software is the biggest problem. Therefore, the key in self-driving vehicles is about getting the software right. In this course, we will investigate the different aspects of self-driving vehicles as well as the importance and application of artificial intelligence in this domain. The course will primarily focus on the following topics:

• Requirements on autonomous vehicles
• Architecture of autonomous vehicles
• Operation systems and frameworks for robotic systems
• Specification and Implementation of autonomous vehicles based on ROS2
• Artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles
• Simulation of autonomous vehicles
• Localization & perception
• Mission planning
• Quality assurance for autonomous vehicles

In the course’s lecture, we provide the required theoretical background and practically apply the course’s content in exercises by building a self-driving robot. You will be given the opportunity to program one of four state-of-the-art TurtleBot3 together with your group. The programming will be mostly in Python.

Lerning goals

• Understanding requirements on autonomous vehicles
• Understanding the architecture of autonomous vehicles
• Ability to build a self-driving car with ROS2
• Understanding and applying quality assurance for autonomous vehicles

Recommended prior knowledge

• The Software Engineering lecture (141346, https://informatik-rub.de/studium/lv/SwEng) or a comparable course
• Programming experiences, especially in Python (e.g., as part of other courses)

Examination

There will be a presentation by each group on their robot project in combination with individual oral examinations.

Enrollment in the course

Courses on this topic with a focus on the software/systems engineering aspects are still rare worldwide; we are planning to develop the course further in the coming years. However, as this is the first education of this course, we can only offer a very limited number of participants. If you are interested in the course, please apply for participation until March 27, using the following form:

https://evastud.uv.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/evasys/online.php?p=avai-lecture

We will use the entered information only to assign participants and will delete all entered information after the assignments are done.