EcoCar: Fall Workshop and the Rose-Hulman Team

For the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology team, the long anticipated final year of the EcoCar Challenge has arrived. Rose-Hulman as well as other teams competing in the challenge came together for the Fall Workshop sponsored by MathWorks in Natick, MA.

On September 30, 2010 we met with some of the team members from Rose-Hulman, as well as Paul Smith from MathWorks, to catch up with them on the progress of the competition and the status of the teams’ vehicle. Rose-Hulman came to the workshop from Indiana to brush up on rules and regulations for the competition, as well as to receive background information on the tooling necessary for their specific program.

At the Fall workshop, the team got the chance to participate in a variety of tracks essential for the design of their car and the competition. Such programs included more basic meetings for new members joining the team, a Matlab and Simulink track, an intermediate track that provided information on modeling motors, batteries, mechanical systems, and other advanced concepts. For the experienced or expert level student, the workshop included courses based on various parts of the challenge. Although the tracks varied in complexity, the reason behind the workshop was simple: to inform and prepare our future engineers.

Paul Smith, a technical lead consultant for MathWorks spoke proudly of the workshop saying, “That’s what this program is really all about—educating the next generation of engineers in the production and the development process that big companies like GM are using.”