Engineering Education in the Age of Autonomous Machines
This work tackles the educational challenge for training engineers in the autonomous driving industry, but it is incremental as it builds on existing cross-disciplinary approaches without introducing new methods.
The paper addresses the supply-demand gap for autonomous driving engineers by proposing a cross-disciplinary educational program that integrates computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering, supplemented by a hands-on capstone project with real autonomous vehicles.
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.