♪ Noises of cars and music ♪
Professor Lee:
This class is a self driving 
car class.
the goal is to cover the 
essential part of the 
technology 
that go into the self driving
car
and introduce all the basics 
to the students
And hopefully after this class 
they know enough
and they can get into a
job market like as a
self driving car engineer.
♪ Car Noises ♪
we built a small town and
have tried to make it as close 
to real as we can 
and so that students can use 
this to 
test their algorithm and test
the cars and 
try to make it as real 
as possible.   
Garrett: 
Our goal was to get it to
drive without having to be 
touched, no human interaction. 
We hit go
and we just leave it.
the class started off with 
lane following
And then we had to train it to
figure out where all the stop 
signs and stop lights are.
it was a lot of image processing
figuring out how to deal with 
all of these pieces of hardware.
We've had a lot of fun with this little figure eight.
we made all these paper 
buildings and 
had a lot of fun running them 
over every so often
♪ car tires skidding | crashing ♪
when we are debugging all of 
our issues. 
♪ laughing ♪
Professor Lee:
So I thought, you know, if I 
could build it
inside and smaller scale 
that even if they, the cars 
run into each other
and nothing is going to break
♪ car crash sound ♪
♪ students laughing ♪
But just with this RC car,
probably $400 a piece.
it can do, 70%
of what we need to do 
for a self driving car.
I think it's unique
it's as close as it gets,
you don't have to build a 
real city.
You don't have to have real 
cars driving.
Garrett:
What's easy is testing.
We can on a computer, put in 
some practice data, 
run our algorithm on it and get 
the result we want.
But when running live 
on the car, 
it's always going to find an 
image it never saw before. 
And always a spike of noise 
that we didn't anticipate.
We have to somehow make our
hand hand coded algorithms 
work with all the possible 
scenarios that it could be in.
Our car did the best
it's ever done.
It ran for about
10, 14 minutes without
any human interaction
we think with a little more
practice we'll be able to,
let it run for a whole hour 
without touching it.
Professor Lee:
I think the automobile industry,
it's moving into
high tech technology
that's perfect for 
our major and we need
to prepare 
our students for that
kind of challenge.
Those big automobile companies 
are recruiting
electrical and 
computer engineers.
If they ever go to interview 
for a job,
they will have the right kind 
of vocabulary
♪ car horn ♪
Self driving car technology
is definitely the future.
