On Thursday, July 11th, two C2M2 Clemson Ph.D. students traveled to Benedict College in Columbia to lead a Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (C/AV) Workshop to interested Benedict students and faculty. This training workshop entitled, CAV in the Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (TCPS), was created to provide fundamental knowledge about C/AV software and hardware in a one-day overview. Attendees learned about C/AV systems basics and received hands-on training on C/AV simulation software. A total of nine students and two faculty members, from varied academic backgrounds, such as computer science/engineering, electrical engineering, and mathematics, attended this workshop.
Some of the students had the following to say after attending this workshop:
“It was a good experience seeing the faculty from the Center for Connected Multimodal Mobility (C2M2) to come here and give us a demonstration on how autonomous cars are programmed through a simulation. After getting started on my assignment, we were greeted by a few professors of the C2M2 staff and one of the representatives gave us a booklet for a one-day training workshop hosted by Dr. Chowhury and his graduate students. He covered the basics of coding a simulated autonomous car with step by step instructions based on the scenarios we uploaded from a USB flash drive. Hiding my enthusiasm, I carefully listened to my instructor, graduate students from Clemson, and he explained one scenario where an autonomous car was driving along and following a double yellow line. We got comfortable with the code first before making adjustments. A similar scenario simulated obstacle avoidance with the object being barrels. We observed as the car careened around the objects along the road. The last scenario we did involved coming up with a solution for a simulated accident using C# code. We basically had to fix sections of code by setting the steering using Set_Steering_Angle and Set_Speed which had to be converted into radians from decimals and gave us an angular turning radius and acceleration. All while avoiding an accident by simply ‘turning right’ into another road. Afterwards, we concluded with specific questions pertaining to the C2M2 Workshop and I was enlighten by the entire experience.” (Computer Engineering, Junior)
“Webots is an open source robot simulator that provides the user with complete development environment to model, program, and simulate robots. You can also use this multiple coding languages for this software such as C, Javascript, and Python. In my opinion, I thought this program was very interesting, because it gives the user an environment that can react in real time situation. I also though this program was interesting, because it provides the users different vehicles, sensors, and etc, in order to help simulate a scenario that can occur realistically. I would like to continue using this program, and create scenario with autonomous vehicle to help improves the research results. It is also better to use this program with a Windows computer rather than an Apple computer.” (Computer Engineering, Junior)
Our Clemson team will continue to offer this workshop to any interested parties, and have an additional two-day workshop available. Contact us at c2m2@clemson.edu if you are interested in hosting this workshop.