Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 2 No. 2 Summer 2017 | Page 27

STORY BY ROSAIRE BUSHEY
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
ME leads
team into
AutoDrive
Challenge
Virginia Tech was selected as one of eight uni-
versities to compete in the AutoDrive Challenge,
a new collegiate competition sponsored by the
Society of Automotive Engineering and General
Motors.
Each team will be provided a 2017 Chevrolet
Bolt electric vehicle as a platform to develop a
fully autonomous passenger vehicle. At the end
of the project, teams will compete by navigating
an urban driving course in autonomous mode.
Al Wicks, associate professor of mechanical
engineering in the College of Engineering, will
lead a diverse team of faculty and students who
will work on the project.
“As part of our proposal to be selected for the
AutoDrive Challenge, we leveraged our techni-
cal diversity by constructing a team featuring
the mechanical, and electrical and computer,
and civil and environmental engineering, and
computer science departments,” Wicks said.
With dedicated facility support through the
College of Engineering, Wicks’ plans for the
team go beyond the design and construction of
the autonomous system.
“This is an excellent opportunity to have our
students take part in a team dynamic that fea-
tures a variety of disciplines with a specific goal
– much like they’ll face when they head to work
in industry after graduation,” Wicks said. “We
will link our existing courses with the real-world
applications of AutoDrive, integrate underclass-
men by assigning projects that support the
effort, and help our students develop other skills
that aren’t often covered by engineering cours-
es, such as communication, meeting organiza-
tion, and presentation skills.”
Wicks said the team would also include sup-
port from TORC Robotics, Advance Auto Parts,
and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.
“As is true of all our competition teams over
the years, the support we receive from industry
sponsors and Virginia Tech institutes and de-
partments outside engineering has always been
critical to our success,” Wicks said. “Looking at
the experience our team has and the collabo-
rative response we’ve seen so far, I’m confident
we will have earned our place among the top
universities that have been selected for this
competition.”
In addition to graduate and undergraduate
students, more than a dozen faculty will be part
of the AutoDrive Competition team, which is
entirely independent of the other 15 vehicle and
autonomy teams supported by the college.
MOMENTUM SUMMER'17
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