Self-moving robot cars at the Embedded C internship for automotive mechanical engineering

Automotive mechanical engineering, Infrared, ultrasonic, microcontrollers, Arduino – do these sound familiar to you? If yes, chances are you know a bit of embedded and you are not so far away from engineering services. The automotive engineering team of AROBS is the most extended, it has an extensive automotive mechanical engineering expertise and it works for the leaders of automotive industry. We help create the cars of the future and we are offering automotive engineering jobs for the future experts in the field.

So, for the cars of the future, we are looking constanly for the future automotive mechanical engineering experts. This is exactly the case of our latest embedded internship graduates. The 6 youngsters today presented the robots they have created.
They were organized into 2 teams, each with its own approach towards how it should be done. The challenge was to create a self-moving robot that recognizes and avoids obstacles.

The embedded challenge

The teams received Arduino microcontrollers and other pieces of hardware. They had 2 months to create a working smart robot that could meet the challenges without using predefined libraries. They did everything from scratch.
Although they have faced multiple challenges the robots were ready and working on the day of the presentation.
They figured out that they had to combine infrared and ultrasonic sensors in a smart way using the benefits of both. Infrared for example does not react great with dark colors and ultrasound doesn’t recognize certain material like sponges.

Creativity

The embedded interns surprised the mentors with their creativity. They proved their youthful creativity when it came to the robot and also when it came to the presentation.
The presentations were so funny and accurate that these technical youngsters engaged the whole auditorium for the whole presentation.
As we all know in the automotive industry great functionalities are not everything that matters. Design is just as important. So came the idea to one of the teams to create a body that is inspired by Elon Musk’s cybertruck. It was amazing. And it also… worked.
All eyes were on the miniature cybertruck.

The embedded experience for the automotive engineering jobs

One of the most important parts for them, based on their testimonials was the progress. Personal progress alongside professional progress in automotive mechanical engineering. One essential part of their experience was how to handle a tense situation in a team. It is not something you count on when you apply for and embedded C internship. However, it is essential to the output and to the collaborative process.

Here is what Dan, a 4th-year automation and computer science student said about the experience:

Expectations

When we applied to the internship, we were told that we need to build an obstacle avoiding robot, in the C language, Atmel work environment to be more precise, with a mention: we needed to implement all the drivers from scratch, without the use of pre-existing libraries or modules. I’m not going to lie, when I heard about implementing the drivers from zero, I was not sure whether I would be able to do it since I had no before-hand experience with working on libraries, but I was up for a challenge and I decided to accept. Best decision I could make.

Agile – Git – Jira

We worked as two teams of three with the final goal of implementing a fully functional robot which avoids obstacles. Even though our mentors told us that it would not be a contest between the two teams, we still felt a bit pressured if the other team would be even just a bit ahead with the work than we were.
In the eight weeks we learned about the work environment (we tried working Agile, we used Git for version control which gave us some headaches before we got the hang of it, we used Jira to log our work), we learned to code better but most importantly, we learned the true importance of working in a team.

Mentors

Our mentors were always there by our side in case we needed any help, even for the smallest of the tasks. This made me consolidate coding skills and I developed new good habits (like using naming conventions, commenting on the code, logging daily work and asking for help whenever I needed it), important for working in a software company.

Watch it for yourself

Watch how the robots handled obstacles. Remember, there is no remote involved. They are utterly alone on their paths.
All these talented young people found their way in AROBS and . We are so glad that you have #puzzledin.

Curious about what it is like to have one of our automotive engineering jobs and work in great projects for the cars of the future? Read more about the humans of automotive.