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Teaching autonomous-driving concepts with diagrams

If you’re explaining lane changes, intersection negotiation, sensor-coverage gaps, or any other self-driving / AV / AD / ADAS concept, you need diagrams that:

  • Look like roads without you having to manually mimic lane markings.
  • Are editable live so you can adjust during class.
  • Are exportable to whatever your slide / handout / LMS tool needs.

That’s the slot drawtonomy can fit into for educators.

Classroom use patterns

Section titled “Classroom use patterns”
  • Live drawing during lecture. Sketch a 4-way intersection in 30 seconds, drop two cars onto it, ask the class to identify who has right of way.
  • Handouts. Pre-build a small set of canonical scenes (unprotected left, merge with mismatched speeds, pedestrian crossing during turn) and export them as PNG for printed worksheets.
  • Assignments. Give students a .drawtonomy.svg template and ask them to add the planner’s expected path, the perception failure mode, or the sensor-coverage cone.
  • Driver-education classes (human drivers, not robots). The same lane / vehicle vocabulary is useful for explaining safe following distances, blind spots, and roundabout entry rules.

Why it works for teaching

Section titled “Why it works for teaching”

Three small wins compound:

  1. Lane direction is explicit. Drawtonomy renders lane direction as part of the lane shape, so students see at a glance which way traffic flows.
  2. Lane connections are not just visual. If you ask “what happens if vehicle A turns left here?”, the planner-relevant lane connection is visible (next / previous / left / right).
  3. Editable in real time. A scenario can be modified live (“now add a pedestrian here”), which keeps the diagram coupled to the lecture rather than a static slide.

What doesn’t work well

Section titled “What doesn’t work well”
  • 3D / first-person illustration. drawtonomy is strictly top-down. For sensor cones, FOV illustrations, or first-person POV, you want a different tool.
  • Highly stylised illustrations — children’s road-safety material is often easier in Illustrator/Procreate.
  • Quizzes with auto-grading. Drawtonomy has no built-in assessment mode. You can use it to create the figures and pair them with whatever assessment tool your LMS provides.

Run it live in class

Section titled “Run it live in class”

The diagram doesn’t have to stay static. Take any of these scenes into the scenario editor, add a speed or lane-change action and a trigger, and press play — the storyboard runs right in the browser on esmini compiled to WebAssembly, with transport controls to scrub through the moment and a PASS / FAIL verdict from the END / FAIL conditions. Nothing to install on student laptops. It turns “here’s what a cut-in looks like” into “watch the cut-in happen, then change a speed and watch it again.”

Suggested starter set

Section titled “Suggested starter set”

Build these once and reuse all semester:

  • 4-way unprotected intersection with two vehicles approaching.
  • Roundabout entry with one ego and one through vehicle.
  • Highway merge (acceleration lane + main lane).
  • Pedestrian crossing during a right turn.
  • Cut-in scenario on a 3-lane highway.

Save the .drawtonomy.svg source; export PNG/SVG variants as needed.

Section titled “Related reading”