Autonomous Vehicles (H7122)

15 credits, Level 6

Spring teaching

On this module, you'll study the concepts and operating principles, along with challenges and technology, of autonomous vehicles. The focus is on the planar vehicles.

Topics include a systematic understanding and practical experiments of:

• vehicle dynamics focusing on kinematics and dynamics of unicycle robots for modelling, simulation and control of the longitudinal and lateral motions
• vision-based perception including sensors, image processing techniques to percept the surrounding environment and different techniques to represent the precepted maps
• the mapping and Localisation algorithms, including odometric and simultaneous mapping and localisation (SLAM)
• the potential field and search-based motion planning algorithms to achieve a destination while avoiding obstacles.

You’ll also gain a systematic understanding of advanced estimation and control techniques for autonomous vehicles.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 33 hours of contact time and about 117 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2024/25. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.