Welcome to Diane Peters' website
I have several areas of research, both strictly technical and in the area of engineering education.
One of my current projects involves autonomous vehicles. Currently in its early stages, this project features autonomous 1:18 scale cars. A commercially available RC car has been modified, to work off of the National Instruments myRIO controller, and sensors have been added to the car. Once testing is complete, several more will be produced, and then I plan to build a reconfigurable cityscape, with city streets, traffic signs, and a few buildings (to provide a realistic situation, where sensors have to work in a cluttered environment).
Once the environment is constructed, I plan to test algorithms for autonomous vehicles, with particular attention to how vehicles interact.
For videos of the car detecting and going around an obstacle, click here , here , or here .
My primary interest in engineering education research is in the experiences of returning graduate students - those graduate students who, rather than going directly from their undergraduate education straight to graduate school, spend significant amounts of time working in their field prior to graduate study. I launched a small preliminary study in 2010, with a collaborator at the University of Michigan, and the work has continued and is still ongoing. Publications on this topic and others are available on my Publications page.