CURRICULA RICH IN AUTONOMOUS SYSTEM LEARNING PATHS AeroAstro’s undergraduate and graduate curricula offer students a rich set of paths, at a range of depths, for developing the professional expertise needed to create each of these types of autonomous systems. Undergraduate students can focus on methods for making systems more autonomous through the 16-2 Aerospace Engineering with Information Technology degree, or they can focus on the hardware design of a next generation unmanned air or space vehicle through the 16-1 Aerospace Engineering degree. Alternatively, students can use the 16-ENG Flexible Engineering degree to delve deeper,by concentrating on an autonomous system subfield, such as mobile communication, or to couple autonomous systems with a societal need, such as environmental monitoring. Through the department’s capstone design sequence, students learn to work as a team to create an unmanned air or space vehicle system. Students also have the opportunity to work with world-class researchers to pursue cutting edge research on autonomous systems, through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and AeroAstro’s experimental design sequence. The 16-2 Aerospace Engineering with Information Technologies degree offers an ideal opportunity to develop a broad background in aerospace vehicle design and information technologies needed to create a range of autonomous systems. The degree begins with a core of courses in aerospace vehicle design, including materials and structures, thermodynamics and propulsion, fluid dynamics, coupled to a core of courses in information engineering, including dynamics, feedback control, signals and systems, computer programming, and probability and statistics. A hallmark of the department is our unified approach to teaching four of these subjects and their interdisciplinary interactions. Layered on top of the core are professional area subjects and electives that offer broad exposure to the disciplines needed to develop robust, highly autonomous, mission-critical systems, including principles of autonomy and decision making, human factors engineering, real-time systems and software, digital systems laboratory, robotics: sciences and systems, feedback control systems, and communication systems and networks.
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AEROASTRO 2010-2011