Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Perspectives on EcoCAR 2 Winter Workshop

Undergraduate engineering student, Phillipe Bongrain, gives his perspective on the Winter Workshop:

I thought that the EcoCar2 Winter Workshop hosted in Freescale's corporate headquarters of Austin,TX was an amazing opportunity to meet our sponsors and the other universities participating in this competition. It was also a time to show the hard work our team put into the project, our understanding of HiL, its purpose and the challenges involved with safety critical testing. I learnt a great deal about CAN communications as well as what exactly was expected from our team with regards to HiL testing and simulation. The Winter Workshop was also the opportunity to receive training on every aspect of the competition. I personally really enjoyed the Freescale training session on the IMX53 ARD and IMX LVDS, the new center stack touchscreen interface that we will have to integrate in our hybrid vehicle. Center stack technologies are the new challenge of modern vehicles and I am really excited to participate in the development of this interface. Finally, I though that our presentation went well. We were able to show our strong understanding of safety critical testing and present our plans for further model development and HiL testing. The demonstration went very well. We demonstrated the base vehicle model running and some fault mitigation, both at the signal and logical level. The next step is to integrate the hybrid vehicle model, automate the safety critical testing process and develop an efficient supervisory controller strategy. Thanks a lot to all the sponsors who worked really hard for this event to take place and I look forward to continue working in the amazing project.