Ryan ChartrandFour Cal Poly students have taken their senior project to the international level by making it to the final round of the Collegiate Student Safety Technology Design Competition held in Lyon, France, June 18 to 21.
The competition is part of the biennial Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference, designed to showcase the latest vehicle safety innovations from around the world.
Mechanical engineering seniors Danny Murphy, D.J. Parsons and Justin Carpenter teamed up with computer engineering senior Duane Howard to create their project entitled “System Integration of a Pre-Crash and Crash Test Avoidance Vehicle.” The focus of their enterprise is a cart which uses a combination of pre-crash and collision avoidance technologies; if the cart is unable to avoid the accident it is capable of measures to lessen the impact.
“This project has been an interesting experience; our final product is something useful that is helping work towards safer vehicles, which is important,” Howard said.
With the help of mechanical engineering professors Charles Birdsong and Peter Schuster, the group was able to bring together data and resources from several previous senior projects to create their final vehicle.
Since 2004, senior projects under the supervision of these professors have tested a variety of sensors, including LIDAR and RADAR sensors, created sensor filtering algorithms and built a test vehicle capable of using the sensors to enhance safety.
“The sensors that our cart utilizes are already built into most vehicles; technology like this would be easy to implement,” Murphy said.
This senior project was responsible for bringing it all together by programming the algorithms for the sensors into the vehicle. The cart displays autonomous warning and braking and an airbag deployment 10 to 20 milliseconds prior to impact.
“Different senior projects all completed different tasks; we basically put the brain into the car,” Parsons said.
After a project demonstration to three representatives visiting campus from the U.S. Department of Transportation on March 19, this group was one of three North American teams chosen to compete against seven other regional winners in France. Other North American finalists include Stanford University and Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
The Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference emerged under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society back in 1970, although it was officially implemented by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The conference can be held in any of its 23 participating countries, and the last conference in June 2005 was in Washington, D.C.
The competition goes hand in hand with the goal of the conference: to encourage the research and development of vehicle safety technology. Those applying to be a part of the competition need to have a project that exemplified progress in a real-world vehicle safety problem.
To make the final cut, projects needed to qualify at one of the regional levels: North America, Europe or Asia-Pacific.
During the competition, all student teams will be reviewed by a panel of judges. Teams will need to present a PowerPoint outlining important information pertaining to their project and will have a 10-minute time slot to demonstrate the abilities of their functional models.
Contest winners will walk away with the recognition of their peers and a monetary prize.
“I don’t think any of us really expected all of this,” Murphy said. “It feels neat to know we are representing America’s schools. We are all really excited.”