Educational Applications of the Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab: A Summary

In the domain of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs), small-scale testbeds bridge expensive testing in the real world and computer simulations. Meanwhile, they offer educational opportunities for students to acquire hands-on experience in areas like control, vehicle dynamics, trajectory planning, and real-time software. At RWTH Aachen University, we, the Cyber-Physical Mobility Group, built a small-scale testbed, the open-source and remotely accessible Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab (CPM Lab). We use it for one undergraduate course, one graduate course, and an international competition. Our literature research indicates that no similar publicly available testbed offers continuous educational applications for all academic levels, including postgraduate students. This paper presents (i) an educational umbrella concept designed to create a course portfolio suitable for undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate needs, (ii) updates to the course concepts with an emphasis on previous publications, and (iii) lessons learned to develop an education portfolio based on small-scale testbeds. We base our results on evaluations conducted over four years involving over 370 students participating in our courses. Our findings indicate that small-scale testbeds can help students become more invested in the topic and may motivate them beyond course requirements.