Summer course on autonomous vehicles for high school students

Intelligent and autonomous vehicles

Tesla, Apple, Google and many others are trying. Will self-driving vehicles be the future? What intelligence is behind these vehicles?

In this course, conceived and prepared by professors of the Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, we will try to answer some of these questions in a technical and scientific way. All the main tasks that an autonomous vehicle must solve will be addressed.

Perception
We will understand which instruments (sensors) are used to perceive the world around the vehicle. In particular, we will learn how to use LiDARs (laser sensors), radars and cameras.

Localization
In order to go somewhere, a self-driving car must know where it is. In this part we will study and put into practice the localization algorithms.

Navigation
How is it possible to avoid accidents and reach the proper destination at the same time? It is the task of the navigation and planning algorithms, that trace the right path.

Control
It is not enough to know where we are, where we want to go and where the obstacles are. A key piece of the autonomous driving puzzle is getting the vehicle to follow our orders. This is the task of the motion control algorithms that we will study, develop and test in this final part of the course.

Led by researchers from the Politecnico di Milano, the students will be able to experience how the design choices discussed influence the behavior of an autonomous prototype vehicle. Students will truly make experiments with an agile autonomous delivery vehicle: Yape.

Technical requirements

To participate in the course, you will need to bring your laptop computer. Under no circumstances may you use a tablet. The necessary software would not be properly supported.
You will need one of the following operating systems with Office installed:

Windows 10 (version 21H2 or higher) or Windows 11 or Windows Server 2022
MacOS Sonoma (14), MacOS Ventura (13.6) or MacOS Monterey (12.7)

The computer will need to satisfy the following requirements:

Processor: Intel or AMD x86-64 or any M-series chip
5-8 GB free disk space
At least 8 GB di RAM

Before the start of the course, you will have to download Matlab (https://it.mathworks.com/products/matlab.html), but to do so you will need a license that we will provide to you (for free) later on. You will receive further and detailed instructions in an email.

If you have any doubts you can write an email to assistenzainformatica.techcamp@gmail.com or join the Telegram group.