
The "Brains" of Autonomous Vehicles
Special | 3m 33sVideo has Closed Captions
NC A&T State prepares software engineering students to lead in Artificial Intelligence.
Autonomously operating vehicles are the next wave of automotive innovation. North Carolina A&T State University’s students and faculty ensure future machines can learn, understand and operate driver-less vehicles safely.
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The Innovators is a local public television program presented by PBS NC

The "Brains" of Autonomous Vehicles
Special | 3m 33sVideo has Closed Captions
Autonomously operating vehicles are the next wave of automotive innovation. North Carolina A&T State University’s students and faculty ensure future machines can learn, understand and operate driver-less vehicles safely.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship[Upbeat music begins] - It seems that we are directing toward having everything smart, right?
The smart transportation, the smart agriculture, smart energy, right?
So autonomy is at the heart of every smart team and I think we are on the right direction to make the world more smart and autonomy is going to be playing an important role in that sense.
- My mother is actually a farmer, you know, so it's one thing to actually, you know, be involved with agriculture but to see my area that I initially didn't think had any interaction with agriculture at all to kind of merge those two worlds and to, you know, combine them and be actually to, you know, provide something beneficial.
And it really opened me to a whole new experience.
When we were doing this project, I actually think about, you know, how can I actually help?
And how can, you know, I can make this process easy on her because that's what our goal is.
Our goal is to actually make the process easier on the farmers and actually have a system in place that can be reused over and over again.
- Our job as professors is to show them, "Hey, here are the applications that you can position yourself to be prepared for," right?
So the torrid and the knowledge that you're learning at the earliest stage of engineering career is good.
It's necessary.
But also you need to look at the applications that you are, that you are going to be prepared for and are going to be addressing at some point.
So that is a challenging problem.
And I think with so many integrated research and education activities that we do have at North Carlina here, AT&T State University, we are successfully handling that problem.
And the students have the opportunity to join the research labs, gain the skills that they are needing, and be prepared for the future market and future careers.
- My research was to make sure the control system we built for the vehicle is stable.
The car will be driving itself.
We do have a system integration box there you can set the car into different modes- manual mode, autonomous mode.
There are a few modes too, if we feel that something goes wrong, we can directly pull them away from the regular autonomous mode and stop the entire operation.
We are feeding a lot of information, like it's like, you're teaching quantum physics to a sixth class student, right?
So at the same time, you want to make sure we feed them into a, in a particular way.
You understand everything in detail, the same thing.
- The AMT is having a very nice pool of talents.
The students that we are having, they are the drive for the university for teachers, professors, every, everywhere around.
[upbeat music concludes]
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The Innovators is a local public television program presented by PBS NC