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They are speeding, rushing, moving and burning tires, steaming other racers and leaving them in the dust.
But it was less the glory of accelerating, pushing, moving and burning rubber on the track than the glory of learning about and troubleshooting their cars, two of the 10 Amazon Web Services DeepRacers the tech faculty recently bought thanks to a $100 tech 15,000 educational contribution from industry partner, Discount Tire.
At least, that was Paradise Valley High School’s kind of race car driver glory. Atharva Goel and senior at Arizona College Prep kevin chor imagined
the Grand Canyon University High school STEM summer internship interns (they were two of 24 interns on campus studying everything from biomedical engineering to exercise science) spent the summer anticipating the car race, which was recently held in the Catalina classroom space adjacent to the Sunset Auditorium and Technology Center. Building.
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The 1/18 scale race cars teach reinforcement learning, a type of machine learning in which developers train machines, like AWS racers, to make a sequence of decisions. In this case, Goel, Chor and the other AI/ML interns are essentially teaching the cars how to drive autonomously, then racing on a cloud-based 3D racing simulator before moving on to racing on a real track. .
The cars drive autonomously using cameras to view the track and a booster model that students create and load into the car. According to AWS, the car shows how a model trained in a simulated environment can be transferred to the real world.
“(The technology) is exactly the basics of a Tesla car,” he said. jevon jacksonProgram chair and software engineering program leader at the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology.
Students have spent the last few weeks using the Python programming language to “teach” cars how to drive themselves.
It’s just one of the projects that were developed as part of the high school summer STEM internship program, run by K12 Educational Development in partnership with Honors College. In their second year at GCU, high school juniors and seniors in the program were integrated with GCU faculty and student mentors.
They were on campus five days a week and spent 100-200 hours during their internship, exploring science, technology, engineering and math disciplines and attending professional development sessions hosted by Honors College.
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The AI/machine learning interns, working with AWS DeepRacers, were learning something fun but also very challenging, Jackson said.
“It’s very, very complex,” Jackson said of reinforcement learning. “Imagine professional athletes, people who are seeing, in their mind, the buzzers in their head. It works in his mind, but then put that into the actual game? That’s a one in a million chance of it happening. You have to be extraordinarily good and really physically practice that shot.
“That is exactly what machine learning is. It’s already done in the brain, in the computer system. Then we take that and we’re trying to train the hardware components (in the cars) to work the way the brain says they should. It’s like a baby who learns to learn and has to do it many times to correct himself.”
And there was a bit of autocorrect on the purple racetrack as Goen and Chor tried to figure out why their AWS DeepRacers weren’t spinning on the track like they should. Meanwhile, AI/machine learning intern Stephanie’s fana junior at Desert Vista High School, slid down the track perfectly at least twice.
It’s a scene Jackson hopes will repeat itself throughout the year as GCU students take turns programming self-driving car models.
The AWS DeepRacers are just a preview of what’s to come for the university’s Department of Technology. The process has begun to add an AI emphasis to the software engineering master’s program, something Jackson hopes will happen within a couple of years. The university also hopes to add an AI emphasis to the undergraduate program.
Head of Technology Programs steal loy said the Department of Technology will also run an AWS DeepRacer competition for high schools. GCU students and faculty will mentor high school students to train their cars virtually, and in the spring they will come to campus, load their model into the cars and physically race them on the track.
“I think today was the most frustrating Y funniest day. That’s part of how machine learning works. I think it’s great to learn how reinforcement learning works and how these machines can learn on their own, just through trial and error.”
Atharva Goel, GCU High School Summer STEM Intern
The high school’s AWS DeepRacer program will be tied to the International Christian STEM Competition in the spring, which GCU hosts in partnership with the Association of Christian Schools International.
“We are learning a batch this summer, thanks to our high school interns, about how things work or don’t work, things that we need to fix, like we identified that the track might not be the right type of track,” Loy said of the purple track with the CUG theme. .
He and Jackson suspect they may need a darker-colored track, perhaps black, to contrast with the white barrier lines and other road surface markings so car cameras can better detect those markings.
Goel, who knew a bit of Python before starting his summer internship, said that transferring his model from the virtual track to the physical one has been the most challenging part of his internship so far.
“I think today has been the most frustrating Y funniest day,” he said as he watched his DeepRacer crash into the wall multiple times because it wouldn’t turn the way he wanted. “That’s part of how machine learning works. I think it’s great to learn how reinforcement learning works and how these machines can learn on their own, just through trial and error.”
Chor, who knew “almost nothing” about AI and machine learning, said self-driving cars are the future, and being able to delve into that technology keeps him relevant.
“Get in the physical car and watch it move? It feels good,” she said.
The students had only worked on their AWS DeepRacer models for about two weeks before putting their learning into practice.
Seeing what they accomplished in that short amount of time is “very impressive,” Jackson said: “I’m proud of them.”
GCU senior writer Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at [email protected] or at 602-639-7901.