AutoDrive Competition - Component Design
The Autodrive competition is an autonomous vehicle project sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers. For the past two years, I have been working on our university's team at Michigan Tech. For the First year of the competition, I was in charge of coordinating the four project sub-teams as the student director. I learned quite a deal about leadership and problem solving during this time. With over thirty students working on the competition in the first year, my job was to not only make sure that each of the four subteams was working effectively but also to bring high-level engineering skills to the table.
Throughout the course of this project, I have had to utilize my skills in CAD / 3D design, FMEA, FEA, and Matlab to create functional prototypes and code to allow our vehicle to function autonomously. At the beginning of the competition, I started working on a cooler and mounting solution for the computational hardware. This included a custom liquid cooling loop designed to provide sufficient cooling to the Intel computing platform during the first year of the competition in the Arizona desert. Additionally, my responsibilities were to design mounting components for the computing/cooling hardware, as well as the exterior sensors on the vehicle. I used both SolidWorks and Siemens NX to design those parts. We utilized a 3D scanner available at our university to make a 3D mesh of the interior of the vehicle and then imported it into Solidworks. We repaired the mesh in SolidWorks and exported it to NX to assemble with the CAD files supplied by GM (Subject to NDA). Having three-dimensional models of the interior and exterior of the vehicle greatly reduced the time to produce functional prototypes of mounting components. We used Labview and ANSYS to validate our physical designs with FEA and modal analysis as per our design specifications (Subject to NDA). I was fortunate enough to present our design in the first year competition with four other undergrads and a team of graduate students, for which we received a 2nd place, and 5th overall in the competition.
For the second year of the competition, I have moved to a more technical role as a vehicle dynamics engineer. I am using Matlab and Simulink to design and test a modified pure pursuit steering controller for year 2 of the competition. Myself and another student designed, from the ground up, a modified pure pursuit controller and will be testing it in the coming semester. This has been with the use of Matlab and the autonomous driving toolbox within Simulink. For more information about the competition, look here: AutoDrive Challenge
Throughout the course of this project, I have had to utilize my skills in CAD / 3D design, FMEA, FEA, and Matlab to create functional prototypes and code to allow our vehicle to function autonomously. At the beginning of the competition, I started working on a cooler and mounting solution for the computational hardware. This included a custom liquid cooling loop designed to provide sufficient cooling to the Intel computing platform during the first year of the competition in the Arizona desert. Additionally, my responsibilities were to design mounting components for the computing/cooling hardware, as well as the exterior sensors on the vehicle. I used both SolidWorks and Siemens NX to design those parts. We utilized a 3D scanner available at our university to make a 3D mesh of the interior of the vehicle and then imported it into Solidworks. We repaired the mesh in SolidWorks and exported it to NX to assemble with the CAD files supplied by GM (Subject to NDA). Having three-dimensional models of the interior and exterior of the vehicle greatly reduced the time to produce functional prototypes of mounting components. We used Labview and ANSYS to validate our physical designs with FEA and modal analysis as per our design specifications (Subject to NDA). I was fortunate enough to present our design in the first year competition with four other undergrads and a team of graduate students, for which we received a 2nd place, and 5th overall in the competition.
For the second year of the competition, I have moved to a more technical role as a vehicle dynamics engineer. I am using Matlab and Simulink to design and test a modified pure pursuit steering controller for year 2 of the competition. Myself and another student designed, from the ground up, a modified pure pursuit controller and will be testing it in the coming semester. This has been with the use of Matlab and the autonomous driving toolbox within Simulink. For more information about the competition, look here: AutoDrive Challenge
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