From the start, industry partnerships have played an important role in the development of our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program, and these partnerships are an integral part of the program’s groundbreaking success.
Hiring partnerships with industry leaders such as Mercedes-Benz, NVIDIA, BMW, and Bosch enable us to achieve our goal of directly connecting learning to jobs, and the companies with whom we develop our world-class curriculum help us ensure our students are mastering the most valuable skills in the industry.
Announcing new Elektrobit content
Today, we’re extremely excited to announce that Elektrobit, one of our program’s hiring partners, will now be contributing content for the program as well! Elektrobit is a leading developer of embedded and connected technology solutions for the automotive industry, and will be developing program content on automotive functional safety.
The team at Elektrobit believes that functional safety is crucial to the success of self-driving vehicles, and that it is of vital importance for engineers seeking a role in the growing autonomous ecosystem.
“Autonomous vehicles represent one of the greatest opportunities for innovative engineers to challenge themselves and contribute to a rapidly changing industry. Elektrobit is proud to contribute its deep expertise in automotive functional safety software to Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program, which is truly one of a kind.”—Martin Schleicher, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Key Partnerships, Elektrobit
Over the course of a six-lesson module, students will gain an understanding of key functional safety principles and approaches for automotive software and hardware. Topics addressed will include:
- Safety, systems engineering, and the ISO 26262 standard
- Engineering considerations and functional safety
- Hazard and risk analysis approaches
- The role of safety in software development and systems design
- The relevance of functional safety in current systems, and why it will be even more important in future self-driving cars
Functional safety: What it is, and why it’s important
Functional safety is how we ensure that our automotive hardware and software is acceptably safe. In this new module, students will learn how to decompose and analyze automotive systems in order to identify failure points and risks. Students will learn to categorize these system components based on ASIL and the ISO 26262 functional safety standard.
In functional safety, students take a view of the entire autonomous vehicle system, using the V model. Students will learn to work down the left side of the V model, starting with high-level system requirements, developing an architecture, and creating a software system design and identifying software safety requirements.
An expanded partnership
No one is more excited about this expansion of the Elektrobit partnership than Udacity’s own David Silver, who heads up our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program:
“Elektrobit’s solutions in functional safety represent the state-of-the-art in automotive software for automated vehicles. Our new partnership will teach students in our Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program the functional safety skills required to accelerate the development of automotive systems.”
Elektrobit‘s software currently powers over 70 million vehicles, making them an ideal partner for a program that is focused on developing and building real-world solutions to real-world challenges. The company brings incredible depth of experience to the table, and we’re so excited for our students to start benefitting from their contributions to the program’s curriculum.
A life-changing program
The Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program can literally be a life-changing experience for students. We recently published an article by program graduate George Sung, who begins his story with these powerful words:
“The past year has been quite a journey for me. A year ago I left my full-time job in computer chip design, to go “back to school” for a career change into machine learning. However, I didn’t go back to school in a traditional sense — I decided to pursue online education via Udacity. After a year of online study plus two months of job searching, I landed a job at BMW’s Technology Office in Silicon Valley, working on machine learning applied to their self-driving car efforts.”
We are now accepting applications for the July 2017 term of our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program. With the addition of Elektrobit to our extraordinary roster of curriculum partners, and the inclusion of their cutting-edge content, we are more confident than ever that this program represents an unparalleled opportunity for you to launch a successful career in the amazing field of self-driving cars.
