REU Site: Cognitive and Autonomous Test Vehicles

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This funding provides for a first renewal of a CISE Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Arizona. A team of faculty and graduate students will lead undergraduate students in immersive research experiences in the compelling, challenging and timely area of autonomous systems focusing on autonomous cars. Working together in small groups, the students will learn how to design and implement algorithms, test them in a robotics car, analyze data revived from experiments, and present the results. Students will have access to a safe, full-size robotics car testbed for their experiments. The site will target the recruitment of women and groups traditionally under-represented in the computing fields. Participating students will gain first-hand experience in research and get an insight into graduate students' life that will help them make informed decisions in pursuing postgraduate studies as well as in choosing professional careers, hopefully in computer science and engineering.The project is led by an outstanding team offering state-of-the art facilities and professional mentors to guide undergraduates in explorations of real-world problems. Students will undertake projects in the areas of model-based design, cognitive radio, control algorithms, sensory data processing, vehicle-to-vehicle-infrastructure communication, and multi-vehicle algorithm scalability. Due to the nature of the testbed, participants will be required to use a spiral development process, where new requirements are added only after previous requirements are verified. The spiral development process will permit projects to have a large number of potential requirements and allow the students to explore the requirements in which they are most interested. The participating students will gain experience in academic authorship and presentations and develop videos for broad dissemination of their projects. The students will participate in an immersive opportunity to design components of a pervasive system that might prepare them to explore other societal-scale problems in the future.