UC Santa Cruz 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? University of California, Santa Cruz student Yegeta Zeleke can.

Thanks to a University of Arizona College of Engineering 10-week summer research program focused on driverless car technology, Zeleke and 11 other college students helped to advance the UA CAT vehicle, or cognitive and autonomous test vehicle. Zeleke worked on creating a new programming language that allows for faster programming of autonomous vehicles.

“This language adds a level of abstraction to programming autonomous vehicles, meaning the vehicle can be programmed easily by people with little knowledge of low-level details of the car’s operation,” Zeleke said.

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. 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.

“Participating in this REU program indeed helped me to think more about graduate school,” Zeleke said. “After going through the program, I am more inclined to go to grad school. I will definitely be applying to a few this year.”

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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McKeever, Zeleke publish at ACM SPLASH

Yegeta Zeleke and Kennon McKeever published results of their research project on Constraint-Based Modeling of Autonomous Vehicle Trajectories in the 15th Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling, which is the longest-running workshop in the history of SPLASH/OOPSLA. Their paper, titled "Experience Report: Constraint-based Modeling of Autonomous Vehicle Trajectories" focused on enabling young students (e.g., in elementary school) to safely control a dangerous robot, such as autonomous car, through the application of constraint-based checks during the code generation process. Their experience report discussed the creation of a domain-specific language that allows for faster programming of autonomous vehicles while ensuring valid constraints will be met. The language generates code for multiple controllers that will operate alternatively to allow for fast and effective programming of vehicle trajectories using primitive motions. In addition to improving coding efficiency and reducing the number of programming errors, the language adds a level of abstraction so that autonomous vehicle behaviors may be generated by people with little knowledge of low-level details of the car’s operation. Furthermore, this language ensures safe operation of the vehicle by enforcing a set of user-definable constraints on the output path. A main set of constraints that are applied to every generated path have been specifically chosen to enforce safe switching between controllers and prevent the planning of unsafe actions. A novel application of the language is its ability to permit users to add specific constraints for a particular path; these constraints are checked for validity after the main constraint check is performed.

UA Student Spends Summer at the Controls of a Driverless Car

Kennon McKeever worked on creating a new programming language that allows for faster programming of autonomous vehicles.

Constraint-based Modeling of Autonomous Vehicle Trajectories

Yegeta Zeleke (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Kennon McKeever (University of Arizona)

What if controlling an autonomous vehicle was as easy as drawing a picture? And what if that picture knew whether it was safe or not?

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.

UC Santa Cruz Student Spends Summer at the Controls of a Driverless Car

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