We recently had an event here at the San Jose office where we hosted a dozen Graduate students from San Jose State University for them to present their Autonomous RC cars. This was part of a one semester course, where teams of approximately 15 students simultaneously learned FreeRTOS, CAN bus and other protocols and built working autonomous vehicles.
The teams were broken down into six sub-teams:
The breakdown can be seen here:
Source
The teams did everything from print custom 3D parts to house the sensors to create Android applications to control the car's start and stop GPS locations. The hardware is based on the SJ One board, a custom board made for SJSU Computer Engineering students based on NXP's LPC1758 (Cortex M3). The purpose of using 6 boards was not for lack of power but to simulate a car where multiple dedicated systems have to communicate with each other for the entire system to work efficiently and securely.
How well did they work?
https://community.arm.com/cfs-file/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-19-89/7043.0395f9d0b354b_5F00_00004.mpegts
If you want more details about these awesome projects, their project reports are all available here:
F14: Team2-Self Driving Car - AUG - Embedded Systems Learning Academy
F14: Team3-Self Driving Car - Optimus Prime - Embedded Systems Learning Academy
F14: Team4-Self Driving Car - AUG - Embedded Systems Learning Academy
F14: Team5-Self Driving Car - AUG - Embedded Systems Learning Academy
F14: Self Driving Undergrad Team - Embedded Systems Learning Academy