Fourteen years ago Jesse Alley, then a junior engineering student at Virginia Tech, participated in EcoCAR, one of the Advanced Vehicle Technology Competitions (AVTCs) managed by Argonne National Laboratory.
Three years later as a graduate student, Alley became the team leader for the first year of EcoCAR 2, where he and his cohorts turned a gasoline-powered 2013 Chevrolet Malibu into a plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle (PHEV). The students worked with a faculty mentor and automotive engineers from General Motors, using the same skills and tools that practicing engineers use every day.
The experiences had such an impact on Alley that after earning his master’s degree, he decided to work for Argonne, where he is now a Senior Program Manager for the EcoCAR competitions.
“It’s really fulfilling, supporting a program where the primary mission is people,” Alley says. “Companies have products: cars, microwaves, toasters. Our product is people. We we’re training the next generation of engineers.”
EcoCAR is a four-year endeavor sponsored by the Department of Energy, General Motors and MathWorks that invites teams from engineering schools to redesign certain aspects of an existing vehicle. In parallel with the automotive industry’s evolution from gasoline-powered vehicles to fully electric cars with autonomous capabilities, EcoCAR gives future engineers a firsthand look at the pressures facing today’s automotive designers, and provides practicing engineers with an opportunity to help shape the future of the profession.
Engineering.com spoke with Alley, who gave an insider’s view of the EcoCAR EV Challenge that’s currently in progress.
AVTC: A history of student innovation
In 1988, the Department of Energy launched Methanol Marathon, a competition in which engineering students would redesign a 1988 Chevrolet Corsica to operate on M85 (85 percent methanol, 15 percent gasoline). After receiving numerous proposals, fifteen colleges and universities were selected to participate. General Motors provided the baseline cars and kits of specialized parts to assist the schools with the conversion. Teams were charged with re-engineering these vehicles in less than five months, which culminated in a 1,230 mile road rally from Detroit to Toronto to Washington, D.C.
A second year was added to the competition to make additional refinements and to conduct more stringent and controlled testing. Gradually, the competition evolved from two years to four, and from alternative fuels like natural gas, propane and ethanol to PHEVs, BEVs, and autonomous vehicles. Today’s competitors no longer receive parts kits; instead, they’re provided with the same state-of-the-art tools used by practicing engineers, which they use to design and build their own components and systems.
“EcoCAR has evolved quite a bit from my time as a student,” Alley says. “Back then, we were converting ICE vehicles to PHEVs that required substantial mechanical integration work and used 15+ kWh battery packs that we designed and built. The software work was significant, but ultimately very rough compared to industry standards. Now, the scope of the mechanical integration has been reduced but the expectations for the process, refinement and overall rigor of the vehicle software has increased. There’s also the challenge of adding CAV vehicle features, which did not exist during my student days.”
Not your father’s Cadillac
This year’s project-based learning challenge has teams modifying a 2023 Cadillac Lyriq. If you think a Cadillac is just a big gas guzzler, this one might have you singing a different tune. While sporting all the luxuries that you’d expect from a high-end vehicle, the fully-electric Lyriq can travel more than 300 miles (483 km) on a full charge, using an economy-scale $16 worth of “fuel” in its 100 kWh battery.
The EcoCAR EV Challenge teams will focus on designing a new powertrain and adding their own connectivity and automated driving features. Other AVTC competitions have focused on EV battery pack design, but that’s a complete project in and of itself, so for safety reasons and time constraints, the teams will stick with the factory battery pack rather than designing their own.
EcoCAR project timeline
Each EcoCAR challenge is carried out over four years. The first year is purely design work, culminating in a year one design review competition. “Model-based design is a huge element of this competition,” Alley says. “Simulation software from companies like MathWorks and dSPACE are the same tools that OEMs use.”
Teams will present their designs to industry experts, just as practicing engineers deliver design reviews to engineering managers. This is even more intense than a real-world engineering design review, since the teams are being scored on their presentations as well as their designs. Engineering students quickly learn why communication classes are required in a technical curriculum!
During the second year, the teams receive their stock vehicles, where they begin building and installing their custom-designed systems. The year two goal is to have all features up and running at a baseline level. In the third year, the emphasis is on testing and optimizing the propulsion system, while connectivity, ADAS, and AV capabilities will be fully developed in year four.
“In the last two years, the vehicles will need to have a lot of up time for testing,” Alley says. “The connected and automated vehicle features—you can’t develop those systems unless you’re out driving with the vehicle, collecting data, and seeing how the vehicle reacts. There’s not a good way to do that in a simulation environment.”
Along the way, students will develop real-world hands-on skills, using the same state-of-the-art hardware and software tools that automotive engineers are using in the field. The experience is roughly equivalent to a year of on-the-job training, making these engineers ready for the workforce immediately after graduation.
“EcoCAR has been able to drive cross-disciplinary collaboration with our universities. Academia tends to live within its silos; EcoCAR is a valuable catalyst to break down those walls and give students experiences that mirror the ways in which industry functions,” Alley says.
Powertrain
To develop the propulsion systems, teams will use MathWorks’ MATLAB and Simulink to model the stock vehicle and to evaluate the performance and energy consumption characteristics of various motor systems to see how they might perform with the Lyriq. Later, when they’re in the testing phase, they’ll feed those models into the SpeedGoat real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulator. Siemens’ Flomaster models thermal loops for the teams’ custom-designed propulsion components and VeSyS is used to design and document electrical sub-systems and wiring harnesses.
Electronics
While previous EcoCAR challenges were heavy on mechanical design (and, in turn, primarily attracted mechanical engineering students), this one throws the balance a bit toward the electronics and computing disciplines. Vehicle sensors such as lidar, radar, and 3D cameras deliver a slew of complementary data that must be filtered and processed. Budding data scientists and software engineers will have a field day programming sensor fusion algorithms to turn raw sensor data into information that the AV can use to safely navigate the streets. Aspiring EEs can work with NXP Semiconductor’s NavQPlus embedded control board with its associated suite of software tools to enable edge computation for AI and ML, including visualizations for team-added displays and controller-area network (CAN) gateways to read and process sensor signals.
EcoCAR teams will be using an entire controls and modeling development toolchain provided by MathWorks, which includes controller and model design in Simulink and Simscape, as well as hardware deployment tools from Speedgoat in the form of a Hardware-in-the-Loop bench, and a rapid prototyping controller. They’ll design, deploy and test their propulsion systems entirely within the MathWorks environment, from early development and lab testing to actually driving the vehicle.
The dSPACE suite with its Autera compute platform provides a software and hardware development environment for designing connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs). Among its tools, the students will be using:
- RTMaps for development and deployment of the software stack
- ASM for real-time models for vehicle development
- AURELION for sensor-realistic simulation
- ModelDesk for graphical user interface for simulation control and calibration
- ControlDesk for experiment software for ECU development
- VEOS for PC-based simulation
The Dataspeed Intelligent Power Distribution System (iPDS) is a flexible solution for powering a test vehicle’s instrumentation, computers and sensors. The system employs commonly used communication interfaces to support drive-by-wire AV design, advanced driver assistance systems experimentation and general automotive electronics testing.
Infineon’s 32-bit AURIX TriCore microcontrollers and sensors are used to expand the in-cabin sensing and Driver Monitoring System (DMS) capabilities. This provides teams with an optional decentralized compute platform for the DMS and/or in-cabin display while also allowing teams to re-engineer the DMS to focus on inclusive and equitable design elements.
Connectivity
Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) allows a vehicle to communicate with anything—another vehicle, a smart lamppost, the cloud, etc.—via cellular technology. Cars can tell each other what they’re doing, stoplights can tell cars when they’re about to change, smart lampposts can warn drivers of nearby (but perhaps outside the vehicle’s sensor view) obstacles and pedestrians. C-V2X also enables cloud-based navigation, diagnostics, software updates and data transfer.
Student teams will gain experience with Cohda Wireless’ Cellular V2X communication hardware and Vector’s CANalyzer. In addition to analyzing and simulating controller-area network (CAN) systems, CANalyzer also facilitates interactive ECU diagnosis. Teams will employ CANoe software tools and GL2400 data loggers to capture and analyze data from their Lyriq, as well as perform testing and live signal injection.
Not your father’s engineering curriculum
Since AVTC’s inception over three decades ago, more than 30,000 engineering students have participated in these activities, gaining real-world experience to complement their coursework. “Some of my fondest memories from college were being on these teams and working in an engineering environment with a project that’s bigger than I can do on my own,” Alley said. “I was a football player in high school and I missed the locker room, the camaraderie, being on a team with the competition element. EcoCAR scratched that itch, and it’s really cool from a technology standpoint too.”
Many of the program’s alumni are now working for auto manufacturers, and some are also consulting engineers working with EcoCAR participants. Educators know that there’s no substitute for practical experience, and project-based learning activities like EcoCAR provide an atmosphere that fosters a healthy competition. They can also create lifelong friendships, as Alley and some of his former cohorts have remained in contact long after graduation. All engineering students should have the opportunity for such valuable experiences. It’s good for the students and it’s good for the industry.