Engineering Education in the Age of Autonomous Machines

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a cross-disciplinary educational approach combining various engineering fields and hands-on projects to better prepare students for careers in autonomous vehicle technology.

Contribution

It proposes a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary curriculum with practical capstone projects to address the skills gap in autonomous driving engineering education.

Findings

Highlights the need for interdisciplinary training in autonomous vehicle engineering.

Recommends capstone projects with real autonomous vehicles for practical experience.

Addresses the educational gap contributing to the autonomous driving skills shortage.

Abstract

In the past few years, we have observed a huge supply-demand gap for autonomous driving engineers. The core problem is that autonomous driving is not one single technology but rather a complex system integrating many technologies, and no one single academic department can provide comprehensive education in this field. We advocate to create a cross-disciplinary program to expose students with technical background in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, as well as mechanical engineering. On top of the cross-disciplinary technical foundation, a capstone project that provides students with hands-on experiences of working with a real autonomous vehicle is required to consolidate the technical foundation.