Making a Self-Driving Go-Kart

Penn Engineering students wanted to make a self-driving go-kart that can go as fast as possible, and even as fast as a human driver. Watch this video to hear them discuss their work with autonomous vehicle systems.

“You need to think of the cars as integrated complex systems that work together to make them move,” says Rahul Mangharam , a professor in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering and Computer and Information Science. “I put the students into teams where different people work on different parts of the larger system, and then those teams compete to see who has the best performing car for their grade. It’s a lot of fun—we say it’s 10 times the fun at a tenth the size—but it’s also such a nice way for these budding engineers to truly put their solutions to the test.”