Designing Autonomous Race Car Models for Learning Advanced Topics in Hard Real-Time System

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the design challenge that teams of graduate students are facing, and the solutions they devised, to develop autonomous vehicles for the worldwide speed race competition known as The Freescale Cup. The purpose of the competition is to design the fastest car able to complete an unknown racetrack autonomously. The challenge posed by the competition is an ideal teaching ground for engineering students that can improve with a working experience the theoretical aspects learned in class in different fields such as hard-real-time system theory, control theory, model-based design theory, and computer vision theory. Besides the technical aspects, as cars are developed by teams of students, the competition is also supporting the development of soft skills (such as team work, and communication skills) that are not normally addressed by classical curricula. The results achieved after three years of participation suggest that this approach is very effective in improving the quality of engineering curricula.