2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

To respond to the industry trend and the recent nationwide initiative for producing engineering professionals in the cyber domain, our university launched an undergraduate degree program in cyber engineering three years ago. Cyber engineering combines the fundamentals of computer engineering, cryptography, and cybersecurity techniques to design, incorporate, and secure systems across the digital landscape. This includes, but is not limited to, embedded technology, autonomous technology, edge and end-point technologies. Compared to cybersecurity, in general however, cyber engineering still requires further refinement in its curriculum coverage. The current curriculum for the cyber engineering program at our university is centered on cyber physical systems (CPS) and their security including device-level security, boot security, and attack-resilient hardware/middleware. As an engineering curriculum, cyber engineering requires a variety of hands-on laboratory-based training as well. To help hands-on training in a curricular setting, we have been developing a 1/5th-scale autonomous vehicle as a framework of cyber physical systems for a set of cyber engineering courses. For the 1/5th-scale autonomous vehicle, we adopted an existing platform known as AutoRally which was initially developed at Georgia Tech as a high-performance testbed for self-driving vehicle research and funded by DARPA in mid-2010.
In this paper, we present technical details of our development effort including technical challenges in replicating an “AutoRally” years after the DARPA project was completed, as well as out intended mapping of technical content between the CPS platform and core courses in the cyber engineering curriculum. The primary technical challenges arose from the fact that some of the key components of the vehicle became obsolete and/or discounted. As such, part of the work done for the self-driving features of the original AutoRally required revision with a great deal of effort. Giving details of our work, we hope that the information presented in this paper is useful to educators in cyber engineering in general as well as those in embedded and cyber physical systems for refining a curriculum in the cyber engineering field.