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Professor David A. Forsyth, wearing a traffic cone, puts a student-written object detection system to the test.
David A. Forsyth couldn’t image 30 years ago that his career in academia would involve standing in front of a moving driverless vehicle with a traffic cone on his head. However, this spring that’s what the South African born professor of computer science did as part his University of Illinois class on artificial intelligence.
As the world closes in on the possibility of autonomous vehicles becoming a reality, artificial intelligence (AI) will play a big part in the development. In that light, Forsyth, in conjunction with AutonomouStuff, offered students a unique opportunity to program and test elements used in an actual autonomous vehicle.
The class, Autonomous Vehicles in AI (CS 598), was the result of collaboration between Forsyth and Bobby Hambrick, CEO for AutonomouStuff, a Morton, Ill., based company that supplies research platforms for autonomous vehicles around the world.
The course, taken by some 35 students, included the usual mixture of lectures and reading, but a major component was writing software to be used on AutonomouStuff vehicles. The projects used a variety of standard technologies, including Yolo, a state-of-the-art real-time object detection system.
For another project, students built a detective framework that could detect objects in real time from video on the car’s graphics processing unit.
Another student group used that framework to build a pedestrian detector, which when connected to the brakes of the car, would break autonomously if someone walked in front of it.
AutonomouStuff invested heavily in time and its resources of autonomous vehicles to make the class happen, but in Forsyth’s estimation, the experiment was a big success.
Forsyth’s team is just one of a handful of similar projects coming out of University of Illinois research labs. Tim Bretl, an associate professor in aerospace engineering, for example, is working on autonomous cars in “smart” agriculture through a grant from the NSF’s National Robotics Initiative. Shubhankar Agarwal, an undergraduate in computer engineering, is part of a student team that is building controls for autonomous submarines.
While Forsyth couldn’t have imagined what was possible 30 years ago, he hesitates to make bold predictions about the future of autonomous vehicles.
So, how did it feel standing in front of the moving driverless vehicle?