Welcome to “Principles of Safe Autonomy” (ECE 498 SMA), Fall 2020 edition. This class will soon have the permanent number ECE 484.

The goal of this class is to gain understanding about what it takes to make an autonomous system (like a self-driving car or a delivery drone) safe and trustworthy. You will learn about  algorithms for building autonomous systems (e.g., path planning, particle filtering, lane detection, motion control, and safety verification), develop skills in using robotics, verification, and ML related software tools (e.g., Yolo, OpenCV, ROS, Gazebo, OpenAI gym, Z3), and get to program a real autonomous car! There is no other course like this.

The class meets Mondays and Wednesdays 2-3:20 pm (CT) online. All recorded lectures, course materials, and notes will be posted on this webpage. The zoom links for the live online lectures have been sent by email. Let us know if you did not receive them. For completing the assignments in this course you well need (a) a computer that can run Ubuntu 16.04 + ROS or (b) broadband internet connection to connect to our lab servers.

More details to follow soon. Stay tuned. 

Piazza forum for this class.  You should have received an invite already if you are registered for this class!

Directors: Sayan Mitra and Katherine Driggs-Campbell

Content contributors: Qichao Gao, Aamir Hasan, Minghao Jiang, Pulkit Katdare, Yangge Li, Ted Liu, Hebron Taylor

We gratefully acknowledge the support from the following sponsors: Center for Autonomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Galois for sponsoring the course project prize, AutonomousStuff for the GEM autonomy platform, and Amazon AWS Educate.