Macomb Community College (MCC) and the Center for Advanced Automotive Technology (CAAT) were pleased to host the 2017 North American Council of Automotive Teachers (NACAT) Conference, July 17-20 at MCC's South Campus in Warren, Michigan. More than 300 people attended the event, including 160 automotive instructors, as well as family members, event sponsors, presenters and exhibitors from across the United States and Canada.

The event provided automotive instructors with ample opportunities for professional development training needed to meet their NATEF certification requirements. This year's technical training courses included three sessions by representatives from CAAT and MCC:

• Bob Feldmaier, CAAT Director, presented The Road to Autonomous Vehicles
• Nelson Kelly, CAAT Assistant Director, presented Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles: the Chemistry, the Cars, the Careers
• Virginia Catanese, part-time Lecturer, presented Human Values, Technology, and the Automobile

Hosting the conference allowed MCC to showcase its campus and automotive programs, including CAAT, to conference attendees. The CAAT not only provided attending automotive instructors with technical training, but also provided information on the Center and the free classroom-ready automotive curriculum resources available from the CAAT's online resource library.

As a benefit of hosting the event, the NACAT Education Foundation provides a $1000 scholarship to an automotive student at the host college. The winner of the scholarship attended the NACAT Banquet and Awards ceremony held at the General Motors Heritage Center in Warren, Michigan. This year's scholarship winner was Alix Rivard, who plans to use the award to help pay for her last four classes. Dave Roland, MCC automotive faculty, presented the scholarship to Ms. Rivard at the Awards Ceremony. Alix hopes to become a performance engine builder for Team Penske. The CAAT and MCC wish her much success in this exciting goal!

Additional benefits of hosting the NACAT Conference included a $1000 donation to MCC's automotive program from Consulab Training Aids, automotive textbooks were donated to the college by Cengage Learning, and multiple trade show exhibitors donated leftover materials to the college, which included shop cleaning supplies and other branded merchandise. These donations will be put to good use by MCC's automotive faculty and students.

CAAT Director, Bob Feldmaier, and Assistant Director, Nelson Kelly, visited MCity in Ann Arbor on July 14 and took a ride in a driverless shuttle as part of a meeting of the Michigan Academy for Greater Mobility Advancement (MAGMA). MCity is a 32-acre outdoor testing laboratory adjacent to the University of Michigan North campus. It is the world's first purpose-built facility for testing connected and automated vehicles and technologies under controlled, real-world conditions prior to actual on-road testing.

MCity plans to deploy two 15-person driverless shuttles on the University of Michigan's North campus this fall. The shuttles were manufactured by the French firm NAVYA and they use LIDAR, an advanced technology that uses invisible laser beams to build a view of the vehicle's surroundings, as well as cameras and GPS to generate the data needed by the vehicle guidance system. Testing on the MCity closed course is being used to validate the shuttles prior to their use on public roads. This was the first ride in a driverless vehicle, for both Feldmaier and Kelly, as well as their first tour of the MCity facility.

A presentation on MCity was given at the 2016 CAAT Conference by Jim Sayer, Director, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and is available for download.

The 6th annual 2017 SAE Battelle CyberAuto Challenge™ was held August 6-11 at Macomb Community College's south campus in Warren. It was a chance for students to learn what it would be like to work as a Cyber-Auto Engineer. High school and college students worked on real cars alongside professionals from the automotive industry and government sector.

Researchers say that cybersecurity is a priority for the auto industry in order to provide the safest vehicle experience for consumers. Learning sessions covered vulnerability issues and hacking techniques targeted at connected vehicles. One of the week's highlights was the 24-hour Hack-a-Thon where participants "steal" vehicle data from onboard systems.

SAE International viewed the event as a way to produce a cyber/auto talent "pipeline" among high school and college students, assisting local and national companies with their talent needs.

The 35 students at the SAE Battelle CyberAuto Challenge™ were nominated by their instructors. Student applicants were required to participate in a two-month evaluation process to qualify for the weeklong activities. Although the program was estimated to cost $15,000 per student, it was offered at no cost to the qualifying students as it was supported by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's) and suppliers in the automotive industry and information technology cybersecurity sectors.

Joe Petrosky, CAAT Principal Investigator, provided participants with a luncheon presentation on CAAT and automotive career pathways.

The 2017 Center for Automotive Research (CAR) Management Briefing Seminars were held July 31 - August 3 in Traverse City, Michigan. The seminars deliver thought-provoking, content-rich sessions which provide a vision of where the global automotive industry is headed. The event brings together executive management from automakers and suppliers, along with representatives from the financial community, academia, labor, government, and the business and automotive press, to connect and focus on the issues impacting the industry and the pathways to success.

CAAT Principal Investigator, Joe Petrosky, and CAAT Director, Bob Feldmaier, attended the event on behalf of Macomb Community College.

Keynote speakers represented Toyota Motor North America, Lear Corporation, Magna International, Inc., ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Peterson Institute for International Economics, DENSO International America, Inc., U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and General Motors.

This year's sessions focused on many important topics, many which are related to the work of the CAAT, such as connected and automated vehicles, fuel emissions policy, mobility, design, and innovation.

The opening session of World Class Manufacturing included a presentation on the CAAT by Doug Richman, VP Engineering and Technology, Kaiser Aluminum, and member of the CAAT Industry Advisory Council. A new CAAT video played during the break. Subsequent to the presentation by Richman, the CAAT was featured in a Wards Auto article titled Auto Industry Faces Apprentice Crisis.

CAAT also sponsored an exhibit at the event. Some very high quality contacts were made that are expected to help further the goals of the Center.

In conjunction with the 2017 North American Council or Automotive Teachers (NACAT) Conference, two big names in automotive design recently visited Macomb Community College. Timothy Annes, Head of Jeep® FWD Exterior Design, FCA-North America, and Brian Baker, International Design Consultant, historian, and educator, were named conference keynote speakers by the 2017 NACAT conference planning team at Macomb and were a big hit with conference attendees!

Anness' presentation focused on design expectations for a new generation of consumers. He noted that community colleges can often provide the education needed for today's auto designers and touted Macomb's digital sculpting program, while advising that traditional clay sculptors are also in high demand by the industry.

Baker focused on teaching students automotive passion. He agreed with Anness about the importance of full-size clay mock-ups because what looks great on a computer screen doesn't always look the same in the real world. Baker further noted that while passion is important for the next generation of designers, an understanding of engineering is also needed. For example, he noted that LED lights offer designers a lot of options, but designers need to understand lighting safety requirements and how to work within specified parameters.

Anness is responsible for all exterior advance packaging design activities for the Jeep brand's FWD platform. He reports to Ralph Gilles - Head of Design, FCA Global. Since joining the company in 1990, Anness has held a variety of positions with increasing responsibility in the Product Design Office, including his current position.

Brian Baker is an instructor at the Center for Creative Studies and an independent consultant for automakers in Korea, India, Europe, and the Americas. He is also the founder and former Vice President of AutoArcheology and has worked on the crew of an Indy 500 top-ten competitor in his hometown of Indianapolis.

Dr. Jimmy Ching-Ming Chen, Assistant Professor of the Division of Engineering Technology at Wayne State University (WSU), and Mr. Tony Fan, Wayne State student, attended the ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition in Columbus, Ohio, June 25-28, and presented a paper titled " Lane Keeping System by Visual Technology". CAAT Co-Principal Investigators, Gene Liao and CP Yeh, co-authored the paper along with Michael Wu, also from WSU. Tony Fan's work and travel to the conference were sponsored by the CAAT through its National Science Foundation grant.

The ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition offers over 400 technical sessions, with peer-reviewed papers spanning all disciplines of engineering education. Attendees included deans, faculty and researchers, students, retirees, industry representatives, K-12 teachers, and more. Distinguished lectures were held on Wednesday, and there were two plenary sessions, one that featured the conference's best papers. There were also a variety of division award receptions and banquets.

Paper Abstract: The introduction of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV) is fundamentally changing the concept of automotive transportation. Although many of these technologies are still in development, some of these technologies are already available and demonstrated by the prototypes such as Google and Toyota self-driving cars. To prepare for the future workforce needs of autonomous vehicles in the automotive industry, we developed new, technologically progressive curricula and hands-on labs as well as student project materials.

" Lane Keeping System by Visual Technology" (LKS) is a research and concept-proving student project that will be studied and used to develop teaching materials for the subject of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV). LKS is an advanced active safety system, which uses a front-view camera to detect lane lines and distinguish lateral deviation. It will alert drivers when there is unintentional departure from the driving lane, and then actively steer the vehicle back into the driving lane. Vehicles not connected to the infrastructure do not have real time information of their lane position on the road. A visual identification system using a camera is therefore fundamental for a vehicle to obtain the traffic information.

Web Camera

In this student project, a webcam and a microcomputer (Raspberry Pi) are connected and mounted on a previously developed modified remote controlled (RC) toy car where the car movements are controlled by Arduino. Arduino is an open source project of various single board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control objects. The obtained images are processed by the OpenCV software. The current goal is to identify the horizontal line, the roadside lines, and vertical roadside building lines from the images and then drive the car in the "middle" of the road. The test took place in a long hallway and the RC toy car was able to stay in the middle automatically when moving along the hallway.

The 2017 Professional Development Course on Advanced Automotive Technology was held July 10-11, at Wayne State University's Advanced Technology Education Center (ATEC) on 12 Mile Road across from Macomb Community College's south campus.

It is often called the "Short Course" because it is a two-day lecture held in the summer. This year's participants were a combination of 21 automotive professionals and educators from four-year colleges, universities, community colleges and high schools.

This year a new presentation on Cooperative Connected Vehicles from WSU's Dr. Radoven Muicic drew strong interest. He explained how connected cars utilize Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) for hard and soft safety, mobility and convenience applications. Two additional presentations, Fundamentals of Fuel-Cell Systems and Lightweight Materials for Automotive, completed the training segments.

The sessions concluded with a demonstration showing voltage from an electric hybrid battery at the new ATEC Advanced Energy Storage System Lab, the first of it kind in the country for teaching applied resource and industrial training for Advanced Energy Storage.

CAAT's principal investigator, Joseph Petrosky, is the Dean of Engineering and Advanced Technology (EAT) at Macomb Community College. As such, he is responsible for a breadth of career, technical workforce, and continuing education programs including advanced manufacturing, design, automotive, and media and communication arts. This includes the College's Workforce and Continuing Education (WCE) area and Macomb's Center for Advanced Automotive Technology.

Recently, a former Macomb student, Aaron Hunter, reached out to the college to express his "immense gratitude to the school and its staff." As a recent graduate of Macomb's Control Robotics Technician (CRT) program, Hunter advised that his "life had taken a drastic turn for the better" when he was hired by a company called Process Automation (PA) Solutions as an Automation Designer almost immediately upon graduating from the CRT program. Hunter noted that while at PA Solutions, he was afforded the opportunity to extend his training on the job and for the past several months had been working at the Tesla Facility in Fremont, California. According to Hunter, "it is truly amazing to be working in such a state of the art facility, with over 2500 robots. As a longtime fan of Tesla, I would never have guessed that I'd be working for them! It's such a great feeling to look forward to work each day and know that I have a career. This whole new path in my life started at Macomb's Michigan Technical Education Center (MTEC). Everyone I know that went through the program is having great success and every chance I get, I try to do the same and pass on the wonderful things that the staff at MTEC is doing."

MTEC is a 40,600 square foot facility providing education and training in advanced integrated manufacturing, automated systems and robotics. The MTEC works across multiple industry sectors, and in collaboration with employers, to develop and deliver customized solutions addressing the technical talent pipeline at every level of an organization or industry sector. The joint forces of Macomb's Engineering and Advanced Technology programs work together to provide industry with a highly trained technical workforce and are pleased to have been a small part of this student's success!

Petrosky commented that "Aaron Hunter's testimonial to the wonderful work of Macomb's EAT programs is a shining example of how so many things connect together within EAT.