Feb 06, 2012 - Claremont, CA -

Students in this year's E 11: Autonomous Vehicles course pit their robotic vehicles against each other in the final competition — a Capture-the-Flag style tournament in which the bots have two minutes to traverse an area with eight beacons and change as many of the lights as possible to their own color.

Students designed, built and programmed the vehicles, which generate and detect binary sequences, or Gold codes, to locate and change the beacon color.

Learn more about the E11 Autonomous Vehicles lab

Watch how last year's E 11 students created their autonomous vehicles in the pilot course, a first-of-its-kind engineering elective for first-year students. E 11 guided 39 students through a series of lectures and six labs in which they drew and 3-D printed a robot chassis, soldered a circuit board, assembled a gear box, built sensor circuits, built and tested fuel cells, programmed in C, and generated and detected binary sequences, called Gold codes, for use in navigation.

The interdisciplinary course delivers a hands-on introduction to mechanical, chemical, electrical and computer engineering, computer science, design, controls and energy. Engineering Professor David Harris and associate professor of engineering Nancy Lape created the course.