Autonomous Vehicle Course Lays Groundwork for New Program at Virginia Western

Autonomous vehicle technology embodies a forward-thinking mindset. Teaching that technology requires buckling a seatbelt to keep up with the rapid rate of change in the emerging field. Virginia Western students now get to come along for the ride, as the College offers a new Career Study Certificate in Autonomous Vehicle Technology.

A small cohort of them took the first leg of the journey this spring by enrolling in a new course, UMS 140: Survey of Autonomous Technologies. “We were the test dummies!” said Briana Wood, who graduated in May. 

“Not a lot of people have set the stage for this,” said Dr. David Berry, who steers the new program. Berry serves as associate professor and Mechatronics Program head. The technology is changing so fast, he said, that a reference from 2015 was outdated, and resources from 2020 are headed in that direction.

Key to the course would be hands-on learning and field experiences to supplement lectures. But another issue loomed when designing the course and ultimately, the new certificate program: Autonomous vehicles are large and too costly.

Or are they?

Enter “Minerva,” a mobile industrial robot. Known formally as the MiR 2000, “it’s made to use in an industrial setting, to move parts around in a factory floor,” Berry said. “So you can program it to know where things are, and if something’s in its way, it’s got enough safety stuff all around it to know to stop and go a different route, and think again. And it’s web-based,” allowing the class to log into an interface to create maps and program missions.

Autonomous vehicles, or AVs, use combinations of technologies and sensors to detect a roadway, other vehicles and objects, according to the University of Michigan. AVs are classified into one of six levels based on each AV’s amount of human intervention.

Before 2024, Virginia Western did not have classes that could prepare students for a career involving AVs. “The classes are either all automotive, which gets rid of the physics of the sensors, or they’re all electronics, which gets rid of all the automotive,” said Berry.

Starting from Scratch

“Virginia Tech has a lab in industrial engineering, and they have similar items to ours. But they also have that model of mobile industrial robot,” Berry said. As Virginia Western was designing the new AV course, Berry’s colleagues at Virginia Tech were telling him about the mobile industrial robot’s capabilities. “So I was like, we can collaborate. And the grad students said that they could help us. So it all overlapped and came together.” One of Virginia Western’s vendors helped the College locate a used MiR 2000 model.

UMS 140 participants took over control of Minerva, getting to know “her” features and quirks throughout the semester. The design looks like a box on wheels, but contains sensors such as LIDAR, which operates like radar but with the use of lasers. The MiR 2000 can support 200 kilograms. A strip of light around the base emits colors that follow a code, such as blue for a clear path; red if it senses an obstacle; purple when it’s calibrating; a purple/yellow combination for an error; and green when a mission is complete. Features also include programmable sounds, such as a foghorn.

In March, the students took Minerva out for a spin in a hallway in Virginia Western’s STEM Building. After mapping the classroom and the hall, they merged the maps to help Minerva navigate the hall and re-enter the classroom to complete a mission to a certain part of the room. The robot showed off a full array of color signals as Wood merged maps to overcome the robot’s pauses and errors. 

By May, Minerva took laps around the lab as the class notated its web-based program for students who take UMS 140 and another new course, UMS 162: Applications of Autonomous Systems, in spring 2025. UMS 162, considered a corequisite of 140, will be “a little bit more intensive, a little bit more hands-on,” said Berry. Both courses have a prerequisite of ETR 113: DC and AC Fundamentals.

With the inaugural version of UMS 140, “what we did the first half of the semester was sensors — the physics of our sensors and what sensors are on the vehicles,” Berry said. This was a good introduction to the MiR, “because it’s got all the same sensors that we talked about, like proximity sensors,” Berry said. “The first half set the stage for the AV, and the second half was talking about communication, really all the communication that’s internal to a vehicle.”

Taking Class on the Road

While lectures and labwork gave a solid introduction to AVs, two field trips gave students a real-world context that informed their lessons. Given that Virginia Western’s partnerships helped fuel the program, it was only fitting that partners would provide this important lens. Separate visits to Torc Robotics and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, both in Blacksburg, pushed boundaries in students’ minds.

Dr. Al Wicks from Virginia Tech’s Department of Mechanical Engineering was a driving force to help Virginia Western design the AV Technology Program. In April, Wicks gave the first AV students insight into research taking place in the field.

“The Torc visit was very enlightening with respect to what the current state of the industry is in a particular niche, freight transport. Seeing the applied versions of what we had on our Mobile Industrial Robot in large scale, and seeing workers actually building and testing trucks was fascinating and educational,” said Adam O’Neal, associate dean of STEM and one of five students in the class. “The VTTI visit was more diverse in the sense that there is a lot of research in many different aspects of AV, some of which had never occurred to me.”

Another student, Nat Stuart, compared and contrasted the research focus of VTTI with the technological applications at Torc. “A lot of it was seeing the sensors, how they collect their data, how they’re storing and what to look for,” as far as issues. “But the key takeaway for me was the communications systems within the trucks.”

Seeing the potential of autonomous vehicles throughout the course gave students a long view in career planning.

“I plan on going into automotive for my entire career, but applying this to more of the mechanical knowledge that I have previously helps a lot with diagnostics, if we want to look at it from a technician role,” said Wood. “But just understanding the sensors in general – now I understand more of how the electrical side of vehicles work compared to just the mechanical that I already had knowledge on. Marrying the two is very beneficial to me.”

What’s Next for AV at Western

Registration is open for spring semester, when UMS 140 and 162 will be offered together for the first time. The Career Study Certificate in Autonomous Vehicle Technology, which consists of seven courses, will be conferred for the first time in summer 2025. 

“This is the first Autonomous Vehicle Technology Program available in the Virginia Community College System,” said Amy White, Dean of STEM and Workforce Solutions. “This is a tremendous opportunity for folks to gain entry to this emerging field and participate in a growing workforce. We are so grateful for our partners who helped guide us as we launched this program, and we hope to attract potential students who would like to become part of transportation’s future.”

ABOUT VIRGINIA WESTERN COMMUNITY COLLEGE  

Virginia Western Community College is a forward-thinking community college inspiring individual, community and economic transformation. It provides quality educational opportunities that empower students for success and strengthen communities. The College provides credit academic programs and noncredit workforce training along with distance learning online and dual enrollment courses in area high schools. To learn more, visit www.virginiawestern.edu.