Our AARR Team‘s secret Computer Science weapon–Tim Holcombe–proved his robotic chops today during his final exam/competition for our COMP 462: Embedded Systems class.
Autonomous Car Challenge
CSU Channel Islands’ newest Computer Science professor (and fellow AARR Team member) Dr. Jason Isaacs created our first ever Autonomous Car Challenge for the students in his COMP 462 course this year. Students were provided with the basic specifications for a default autonomous car platform. They had to work in teams of two to create a working unit that could sense the environment and navigate itself through the course. In this case that course was the first floor corridors of our new Sierra Hall laboratory building (home to both ESRM and Computer Science). The students had to run their creations through time trial races through the building using only the sensors mounted on the vehicle and control algorithms that they themselves had written.
In the words of Dr. Isaacs;
Tim’s team won the race by using a really risky strategy but it worked. The second place team had a very nice design that worked very consistency. Some of the other teams struggled but they put in a ton of effort. It just goes to show that it wasn’t as easy as the winning teams made it look.
Open-Ended Challenges
This type of project-based, experiential learning is a hallmark of how we engage with our students here at CSUCI generally and with our AARR student-driven projects in particular. Congrats to Tim and all the Embedded Systems students!
Huge Congratulations to Dr. A and to all of his gifted, cutting edge, classmates!