More than a century ago, the first production vehicle was made by Karl Benz, and later automobiles dramatically changed the way we live. Today, fully autonomous driving has the potential to revolutionize not only transportation but also the entire society. Every year, more than a million lives are cut short due to traffic accidents-autonomous driving could significantly reduce these fatalities. This emerging technology can also save people time. If we start working when we get into the car, how many hours can we save? Especially in a metropolis like Tokyo. Also, autonomous driving facilitates the transportation of aged people, reduces fuel consumption and plays a key role in saving the environment, reducing the number of required parking spaces, and so on.

All the opportunities mentioned above require an interdisciplinary collaboration between autonomous driving experts and researchers in other fields such as city planning, sociology, psychology, environmental science, etc. The autonomous driving platform “GCL-MUSCAT” aims to provide GCL students with an opportunity to utilize self-driving cars and boost their social innovation projects to make our society a better place to live.

In our previous workshop “GCL-MUSCAT GDWS C #1, Safe and Effective Autonomous Vehicle Experiments” we demonstrated our autonomous driving platform to the interested GCL students and provided them an opportunity to experience autonomous driving on campus. The outcome of the first workshop was a safety checklist for MUSCAT that ensures our autonomous driving experiments meet basic standards of safety.

In this workshop, we aimed to extend our MUSCAT professional network and train more students to be able to operate this platform from scratch. Later, these students will be able to help and assist other GCL students from different fields to employ MUSCAT in their social innovation projects. To achieve this goal, the attendees were divided into two groups and received multiple sessions of in situ training and group work from 10 AM to 6:30 PM. The workshop consisted of four main components including a lecture to transfer advanced knowledge of autonomous driving to the attendees, indoor group work to familiarize them with the autonomous driving software Autoware and generate the required data, outdoor group work to train them on how to set up and operate the MUSCAT platform and do the experiment, and finally reflection and group discussion to get their feedback and increase their motivation for future collaborations.