Courses

The RACECAR platform has been used in multiple MIT courses including a summer course for high schoolers. All courses use the powerful RACECAR platform, feature technical lectures and lab exercises, and end in a challenge that involves racing in realistic environments fully autonomously.

MIT Undergraduate Course

MIT’s robotics course, entitled “Robotics: Science and Systems” (6.141/16.405) is teaching robotics with the RACECAR platforms. The lectures teach the foundations of robotics. The lab exercises allow students to practice their skills in building perception software as well as motion planning and control software. The challenge now includes obstacles and floor markers that earn the teams extra points.

Course Offerings:

• Spring 2016
• Spring 2017

BeaverWorks Summer Institute (BWSI)

Summer Residential Robotics Course for High School Students. RACECARs were programmed by high school students. Stay tuned for more details!

Course Offerings:

• Summer 2016
• Summer 2017 (expected)

IAP Hackathons

Course Offerings:

• January 2015: Hackathon 1
  • The first offering of the course was in the month of January of 2015 as an MIT Independent Activities Period (IAP) class. The teams used the first version of the RACECAR. They programmed the cars to race in MIT’s tunnels fully autonomously. The video introducing this hackathon is here:

• January 2016: Hackathon 2
  • Second hackathon took place in January 2015. The cars were updated with new hardware, including Nvidia Jetson TX 1 computers. The cars were made faster. Here is the winning run from the race: