Training Engineers in Autonomous Driving Technologies using Autoware

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles are currently being tested and deployed under the control of a small number of companies and research institutions, but eventually level 4 and level 5 vehicles will become accessible to the end consumer. This means that autonomous driving technologies must be well understood, not only by researchers and highly specialized engineers at large manufacturers, but also by managers and salespeople at start-ups and small mobility companies, and the general public. Grasping the essentials of such technologies is key to understand technology limitations, to reduce overconfidence and negligence, to and prevent accidents.In this paper we present our national and international efforts over the past few years in educating engineers from diverse industrial sectors in autonomous driving technologies. In all cases we used our open source platform for self-driving vehicles, Autoware[1]. We discuss our different training activities, program contents and results. Lessons learned and general considerations for education in autonomous driving technologies are the main contributions of this work.