Students explore autonomous vehicles through camp

“Autonomous vehicles.” Those words are on the lips of many researchers, and high school students got a taste of how to create them.

“Code a Car” is a camp through the World Youth in Science & Engineering program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Students were able to create “the brains” of the car for several days. Camp Coordinator Professor Sayan Mitra said the camp took highlights from one of the Electrical & Computer Engineering courses and incorporated them into five days of activities. They started each day with a lecture in areas such as computer vision and control theory. They would then code that implemented autonomy features like lane detection and control using ideas discussed in the lecture.

In the afternoon, students would work on assignments from the lecture and visit the laboratory to learn about robotics and autonomy. They would then port the code into an actual autonomous car. 

Mitra said this camp was put together to reach out to students and show them the world of S.T.E.M. The camp was beneficial not only for the participating students but also for the undergraduate and graduate students who ran the camp.

One of the graduate students leading the camp, Yan Miao, said, "Not only did we introduce them to some of the fundamental ideas, but we also got to share our experience as engineers, hopefully inspiring some to consider a career in engineering."

“It was very rewarding...working with the middle school students who were passionate about the area to give them some real experience in autonomous vehicles," said Raj Joshi, an ECE undergraduate student, who helped create the technical content for the camp. “The highlight for the camp was when the students were able to run experiments on the physical vehicle, which is [a] rare experience for their age.”

The hands-on material had students excited. “What I enjoyed about this camp [was] when the code worked in the simulation,” said one student, a high school freshman. “It was really satisfying to see all of the hard work that was put into it paid off.” According to Joshi, the students did an excellent job picking up the material. “There was a lot of practical knowledge and real-life applications to the content, and I think the biggest [thing] I hope the students got out of the camp is that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in this space with a lot of challenging problems that need to be solved.”

Professor Mitra said that at the end of the camp, they had an event for parents and family to see what the students had been working on. He was impressed to see how intrigued everyone was by their work.

This was the first year for the camp. The team plans to have another one next summer.

The camp was made possible by a generous grant from the National Security Agency: Science of Security program and the support of The Grainger College of Engineering: Center for Autonomy.