Georgia Southern Student Spends Summer at the Controls of a Driverless Car

Every Fall, students return to class with stories to tell about what they did over summer break. But how many can say they spent the summer at the controls of a driverless car? Georgia Southern University student Sterling Holcomb can.

Thanks to a University of Arizona College of Engineering 10-week summer research program focused on driverless car technology, Holcomb and 11 other college students helped to advance the UA CAT vehicle, or cognitive and autonomous test vehicle. Holcomb worked to improve vehicle-to-vehicle communications while reducing power consumption of communications systems.

Holcomb came into the program having only taken a few cognitive radio courses in the past, but he walked away with an increased knowledge in autonomous vehicles and communications, as well as an interest in pursuing graduate education. The NSF program, Research Experiences for Undergraduates, or REU, provides opportunities for undergraduates to work with faculty mentors and graduate students on exciting research projects at universities throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.

“In addition to the technical knowledge gained through this REU, I have learned how graduate education is structured, how the graduate application process works, and how to properly prepare for the GRE,” Holcomb said. University of Arizona electrical and computer engineering professor Jonathan Sprinkle, an NSF CAREER Award winner who led the 2015 University of Arizona REU program, said the program was a good way to introduce students to research and graduate school.

“Before participating in this REU program, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school, but this helped me decide to pursue a PhD immediately after graduation rather than after several years in industry,” Holcomb said.

For more on the UA CAT vehicle program, visit http://catvehicle.arizona.edu/, and to learn about the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, visit http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/reu/

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Holcomb, Knowlton, Guerra, publish at WInnComn

Sterling Holcomb, Audrey Knowlton, and Juan Guerra published results of their research project in WinnComm'16, the Wireless Innovation Forum Conference on Wireless Communications Technologies and Software Defined Radio, in Reston, VA. Their paper, titled "Power Efficient Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks" was a new approach for Vehicular AdHoc Networks (VANETS) that represents a significant reduction in power use. This benefit enables more vehicles to communicate simultaneously. Through simulation, students showed that their approach to VANETs maintains its update frequency despite bumper to bumper traffic and uses two to five orders of magnitude less power than an IEEE 802.11 network with clustering and 1 mW transmit power. Overall, the network performed well and is a viable improvement to the standard.

The paper was presented in the technical track, "Top 10 Most Wanted Wireless Innovations."

The bibliographic information for the paper is below, or can be accessed at http://csl.arizona.edu/content/power-efficient-vehicular-ad-hoc-networks

S. Holcomb, Knowlton, A., Guerra, J., Asadi, H., Volos, H., Sprinkle, J., and Bose, T., "Power Efficient Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks", WInnComm. Reston, VA, pp. 26-31, 2016.

UC Merced Student Spends Summer at the Controls of a Driverless Car

Juan Guerra worked to improve vehicle-to-vehicle communications while reducing power consumption of communications systems.

NYIT Student Spends Summer at the Controls of a Driverless Car

Audrey Knowlton worked to improve vehicle-to-vehicle communications while reducing power consumption of communications systems.

College Students From Diverse Backgrounds Experience UA Research

TUCSON, Arizona -- Visiting undergraduate students, including some who are the first in their families to attend college, experienced hands-on research---and hands-off driving---in a National Science Foundation program at the University of Arizona this summer. They will demonstrate their driverless tech research projects on the UA campus Aug. 11.

Power Efficient Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Audrey Knowlton (New York institute of Technology)
Sterling Holcomb (Georgia Southern University)
Juan Guerra (University of California, Merced)

Just having cars communicate with one another is not enough: you need to make sure that the right cars are talking at the right time.

Georgia Southern Student Spends Summer at the Controls of a Driverless Car

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