Guy and Seth on Simulink

October 6th, 2009

MathWorks Hosts EcoCAR

Recently, when I arrived at work, I found this parked on the lawn:

EcoCAR Chalenge Year 2 Fall Workshop at The MathWorks

This is the EcoCAR from the EcoCAR Challenge. MathWorks hosted about one hundred students from the EcoCAR teams for the EcoCAR Year 2 Fall Workshop.

A Big Shiny Embedded Target

When I first saw the EcoCAR sitting on the lawn, I wondered what system target file they might use:

An imaginary EcoCAR System TLC file.

I’m sure there are a lot of cool things these students will be able to do with a great piece of hardware like this, but in many ways, it’s just a big, shinny embedded target.

What is EcoCAR?

EcoCAR is an academic competition. A quote from ecocarchallenge.org sums it up:

“The competition challenges 17 universities across North America to reduce the environmental impact of vehicles by minimizing the vehicle’s fuel consumption and reducing its emissions while retaining the vehicle’s performance, safety and consumer appeal. Students use a real-world engineering process to design and integrate their advanced technology solutions into a 2009 Saturn Vue.”

The students had 5 days of training in different tracks to learn and apply MathWorks tools to the design problems facing them. If you read the Green Car Garage blog, you may have read about the event and the fun teams had during their visit to Boston. Nicole Lambiase from Argon National Lab wrote a post commenting that it really takes a village to make these competition events run smoothly. Some of the people in that village are members of the Model-Based Design community. A lot of my colleagues volunteer with EcoCAR Challenge. Many of them traveled from our Michigan office to lead trainings and mentor students that attended.

The Trouble with Model-Based Design

The trouble with Model-Based Design is that there are very few people and institutions available to help you learn it. I never had a class on Model-Based Design when I went to school. The EcoCAR Challenge is an opportunity to develop the next generation of engineers skilled in Model-Based Design. MathWorks is very committed to mentoring these future engineers. This aligns with our academic mission to accelerate the pace of learning, discovery, and research in engineering and science.

How about you?

How did you learn about modeling and Model-Based Design? Who was your mentor? Leave a comment here and share your story.

By Seth Popinchalk

03:00 UTC | Posted in Community, Fun, Model-Based Design | Permalink | 1 Comment »

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One Response to “MathWorks Hosts EcoCAR”

Guy replied on October 7th, 2009 at 00:32 UTC :

I have been lucky to begin learning Model-Based Design during the first semester of my bachelor. Each semester, through a project integrating all classes, l’Université de Sherbrooke (yes, it’s in Quebec and speaks French), shows students how to avoid the old “throw-over-the-wall” design method by a Model-Based approach.

During graduate studies there, I taught Model-Based Design in a Mechatronics course. Each team of students had to characterize a robot, model it in Simulink, design and tune a controller in simulation, generate HDL code and implement their controller on a FPGA, all using The MathWorks tools.

Thanks to this formation, I have been selected for internships at the Canadian Space Agency. They have been using Model-Based Design for a long time. Using Simulink, Stateflow and Real-Time Workshop I have been able to implement everything needed to control a robot with 2 arms, 7 degrees of freedom each, similar to Dexter (The hand of the Canadarm2 now in action on the Internal Space Station). An experienced engineering told me after this internship that without The MathWorks tools the work I did would have required many engineers and cost a lot more.

This is how I learned Model-Based Design!