High School Experiments with the Cognitive and Autonomous Testing Vehicle

Destinee Simone (Northeastern University), Alice Kim (Rice University)

Academicians often focus too much on the rigors of their research and acquiring funding for that research without taking an interest in the minds that will further that research in the future. This project aims to increase public awareness in academic research and pique the curiosity of a younger generation by allowing high school students to work hands on with a university laboratory and its experiments in autonomous vehicle technology. Specifically, this project introduces a novel framework for integrating high school level experiments with the Cognitive and Autonomous Testing Vehicle (CATV). This framework will be able to safely navigate the CATV given a list of commands. This creates an interactive way to incorporate high school students with the operation of an autonomous vehicle in a given obstacle course, as they can calculate the needed trajectory of the car and feed their computations into a set of commands to follow that certain trajectory. Additionally, since the vehicle can be controller with many different kinds of command, students of varying levels of mathematical ability can devise ways to accomplish the same experimental tasks. However, with the input of commands to the vehicle, we ensure that those commands are reasonably set in regards to the relationship with the tire angle and velocity. By passing the commands through a safety net, we can truncate the values in the commands, as needed, to ensure safe and viable turns.