F1/10 Autonomous Racing
This course introduces the basics of Perception, Control and Planning for autonomous robots in a fully hands-on manner. The students build an autonomous car from sratch, using a 1/10th scale racing chassis, a Jetson TX2, and a LIDAR. After getting up to speed on ROS on their own, the students learn how to process LiDAR data and find gaps in it, and how to navigate the car around a hallway by wall-following. They now have the basics to develop more advanced navigation software, and to beat the other teams in a race! Topics include PID, MPC, pure pursuit, and localization and mapping. The appeal of this course is that it gives students a very fast path to seeing something running, and it lowers the barrier to self-driving cars significantly. Check-out the announcement.
Cyber-Physical Systems
This class introduces fundamentals of rigorous modeling and verification for Cyber-Physical Systems through two case studies: implantable cardiac devices and Automatic Cruise Control. Students learn about temporal logics and timed automata in the first half, and specification-guided falsification and reachability analysis in the second. UPPAAL, CORA and Simulink are heavily used throughout. Check-out the latest Syllabus. (Previous editions are here.)
RTL Design and Verification (ECE 4/579)
The first half covers SystemVerilog basics with an emphasis on semantics and how the simulator and synthesis tool interpret the code. The second half covers design verification: testing, writing test plans, code and functional coverage, and assertion-based verification. Students gain a working knowledge of EDA tools (simulation, gate-level synthesis, formal property verification) and the tcl command-line. Checkout the syllabus.