|
CAAT Tracks
February / March 2022
| |
|
CAAT Professional Development | |
CAAT Provides Technical Training at the Michigan Automotive Teachers Association (MATA) Conference | |
|
The Spring Michigan Automotive Teachers Association (MATA) Conference was held March 10-11, 2022, at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI. Nearly 100 people attended the conference which began with an introduction by Ben Upham, Associate Professor in the Automotive Department at Ferris State. Ben thanked the participants, presenters, vendors, five sponsor schools, and staff at Ferris State and CAAT for attending and assisting in the event planning process.
Thursday offered several general training sessions, including ones offered by:
- Dorthy Switalski, Educational Consultant with the Michigan Department of Education, Office of Career and Technical Education (OCTE), who described the work of OCTE in improving current career technical education programs as well as new program development. Her presentation focused on the ASE review process for accreditation for three automotive technician education programs.
- Robert McGinn of Electude and the Coordinating Committee for Automotive Repair (CCAR) made a presentation on hybrid and electric drive safety for compromised vehicles, such as those that have been in a collision, so that OEM systems may be made non-functional. Bob gave a detailed description of the electrical and fire hazards inherent in such vehicles and the safety procedures needed to protect technicians and their work areas.
- Doug Trutzl, Departmental Manager, Business Licensing Section, Office of Investigative Services, Michigan Department of State, described the Michigan mechanic testing and licensing program. He asked for help from the conference attendees in evaluating the questions for an updated series of tests that are being evaluated in a pilot program.
Thursday ended with a roundtable discussion led by Marv Argersinger and Jim Ripley of Lansing Community College on electric vehicle training, including credentials and resources as well as current and future curriculum.
On Friday the meeting began with a networking breakfast with industry updates by Donna Wagner, Great Lakes Field Manager of the ASE Education Foundation (ASEEF). She outlined training opportunities, including the ASE Instructor Training Conference in July in Texas, and an explanation of new accreditation standards. Dorthy Switalski then led a discussion on the requirements of the Career and Technical Education programs in Michigan.
Following breakfast, participants were able to attend their choice of three, 75-minute training sessions, two before lunch and one after, with as many as 10 options per session. CAAT offered presentations at all three Friday sessions. Director Ben Cruz gave a presentation titled, “Emerging Automotive Technologies and Technicians” and CAAT Assistant Director Nelson Kelly presented two training sessions titled, “Connected, Automated, and Intelligent Vehicles.”
- Cruz's training session outlined the three megatrends that will change the course of automotive technology: electrification of the powertrain, automated and connected driving, and lightweighting. These changes will require an automotive technician who can understand computerized electromechanical systems, high voltage battery systems, and the use of mixed materials and advanced joining techniques.
- Kelly's presentation highlighted the forces that are creating a move toward advanced driver assistance systems and increased automation in vehicles. He highlighted the challenges to this movement including cybersecurity threats, distracted driving, and system costs. CAAT’s free seed funding courses and modules that address the advanced technician training needs of the future were highlighted in both presentations.
Conference attendees were eligible to receive up to 10 ASE Education Foundation training hours that are needed to maintain certification.
Throughout the day on Friday, and especially during lunch, attendees could visit with trade show exhibitors who displayed educational training materials and tools. Vendors participating in the trade show included GW Publishers, Tech World, Electude USA, Atech, ASE Test Prep, Consulab, Driv/Garage Gurus, Margaret Dunning Foundation, Snap On, CDX, and Hunter. Electude sponsored the lunch.
View photos of the 2022 MATA Conference.
| |
CAAT Presents at 2022 WorldPAC Supplier & Training Expo | |
|
CAAT Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Gene Liao and Jimmy Chen, both from CAAT’s university partner, Wayne State University, were invited to present half-day training courses at the 2022 WorldPAC Supplier & Training Expo that was held in Orlando, Florida, March 23-27.
Liao and Chen offered the following courses:
- Advanced Battery Systems for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (Liao)
- Fundamentals of Fuel Cell Technology (Liao)
- Power Electronics and Traction Motors for Electric-drive Vehicles (Chen)
Considered to be one of the most exclusive training events in the automotive industry, the 2022 Supplier & Training Expo featured more than 250 brand new technical and business classes including 100 diagnostic classes, 70+ manufacturer-specific classes, 55+ management classes, and 50+ hybrid/EV and advanced driver assistance systems classes! The event proudly offered more classes, more variety, more instructors and more partners than any other training event in the automotive industry!
Instructors included experts from OE brands and Carquest Technical Institute + WorldPAC Training Institute (CTI+WTI). The event also featured an impressive list of exhibitors from 250+ international parts manufacturers, suppliers, brands, and tool & equipment manufacturers!
STX2022 is open exclusively to WorldPAC, Advance Professional, Carquest and Autopart International customers.
| |
CAAT Celebrates Engineers Week with the Girl Scouts and Texas Instruments | |
|
Macomb Community College’s Center for Advanced Automotive Technology (CAAT) offered a session where the scouts were able to design, build and code their own robot in a Dream with Robots challenge. They learned about the engineering design process while working in small groups using UB Tech Design Kits. Advanced and intermediate kits were used for different age groups to discover what makes engineering both interesting and so much fun! At the end of the session, groups presented their project to demonstrate what their invention was programmed to do.
| |
|
Texas Instruments (TI) offered the scouts a challenge that experimented with coding and the TI-Innovator™ Rover robotic vehicle while the students earned their drivers license through a series of activities including parallel parking, Watch Out for Rover the dog, and navigating a series of mazes. The scouts learned how to program a TI calculator with the TI-BASIC programming language and were asked to write their own programs within 10-minutes of starting the session.
| |
A survey completed by the Girl Scouts at the end of the event revealed that:
- Nearly all the girls found the event to be both fun and challenging!
- 95% of the participants said the event made them interested in pursuing an engineering or STEM related career.
The event included lunch and was supported by several local female engineers who shared with the scouts what it’s like to be a real engineer and were on hand to help the girls with their projects. The scouts also received a gift bag to take home with them that included several fun items donated by Macomb Community College, Texas Instruments and the Girl Scouts of Southeastern Michigan. In addition to the partners already noted, the event was sponsored by the National Center for Autonomous Technologies (NCAT)
The Girl Scouts of Southeastern Michigan recently honored the CAAT at Macomb Community College with the Friends of Girl Scouting Award to recognize our commitment to supporting the Girl Scouts movement. We are honored to have received this award and hope to continue supporting the Girl Scouts with educational STEM events for many years to come!
The Texas Instruments Education Technology group develops and provides STEM resources for middle grades through high school. They encourage students to explore, evaluate and explain the world around them with project-based classroom activities, interactive technology and educator professional development that help teachers put it all together in the classroom. TI Education Technology lessons develop skills for 21st-century success with free project-based learning activities that help students explore, understand and connect the principles of science, math, coding, engineering design and electronics.
| |
CAAT Holds mBot STEM Lab for Upward Bound Students | |
The Center for Advanced Automotive Technology (CAAT) provided an mBot STEM lab to students from the Upward Bound Program on March 11, 2022. The program provides opportunities for participants to succeed in their precollege performance and ultimately in their higher education pursuits. Upward Bound serves high school students from low-income families and families in which neither parent holds a bachelor's degree. The goal of Upward Bound is to increase the rate at which participants complete secondary education and enroll in and graduate from institutions of postsecondary education. | |
|
Saleta McMurray, the CAAT’s STEM Outreach Coordinator, instructed 38, 9th through 12th graders at the University of Michigan, Dearborn campus. The students learned organizational skills and how to build a mBot robot of their own design. Afterwards they used a tablet to code and control their robot’s actions.
According to surveys conducted after the session, some students really enjoyed working together and the robot building experience, while others most enjoyed the satisfaction of watching their mBot robot move per their programming. All of them appreciated being able to take their robot creations home with them. Most found the experience to be a fun learning day that made them more interested in pursuing a career in a STEM field or engineering.
The CAAT’s STEM Outreach program for students, focuses on the automotive industry’s need for skilled engineering technicians, engineers and designers. Students learn about the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields with the hope that it will spark interest in STEM classes. The CAAT’s activities aim to create an academic pipeline from middle school to secondary educational programs.
| |
CAAT Attends Michigan Career Education Conference | |
|
Representing Macomb Community College, CAAT director, Ben Cruz recently attended the 2022 Michigan Career Education Conference, Michigan’s only open secondary education career tech conference. This annual event is hosted by the Michigan Department of Education’s Office of Career and Technical Education. It was held January 30 through February 1 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The conference was attended by hundreds of educators, business/community partners, administrators, career counselors and special populations professionals from around the state.
The conference offered more than 90 breakout sessions and a trade show with more than 40 vendors who offered state-of-the-art techniques and technology that can help educators take their career training efforts to a higher level.
Attendees were:
- Offered the chance to discover innovative tactics that best position occupational and career training for the future.
- Provided opportunities to explore innovative breakout sessions and techniques that cannot be found at any another career tech conference.
- Given time to network with educators from around the state.
- Able to learn from successful career and technical education (CTE) programs from around the state that promote strong student achievement.
- Provided opportunities to discovered how technology from the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way of CTE programs and how to move forward with these changes.
Save the date for the next Michigan Career Education Conference which will be held January 29-31, 2023, at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
| |
|
Can Cars Gesture
A virtual reality experience tested pedestrians’ reactions to a variety of autonomous vehicle (AV) signaling motions, such as braking earlier or stopping well short of the pedestrian. This study reports the impact of an AV's expressive stopping actions on a pedestrian’s decision to cross the road in front of an AV.
| |  |
|
Electric Vehicles & Hybrid Technology Course
Provides an in-depth look at hybrid vehicle components including the Atkinson engine cycles, AC Induction & Permanent Magnet electric machine construction and operation, battery packs, power inverters, transaxles, and other electric propulsion systems.
| |
|
The Evolution of ADAS
Growing interest from both consumers and safety regulators is driving a surge in the adoption of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) across all vehicle classes. This report identifies three key challenges that the automotive industry must address to gain consumer acceptance of new ADAS systems.
| | |
|
Fundamentals of Lidar Technologies Module
This curriculum module provides a foundation on the growing technology of Lidar and is recommended for high school students and above. Included is a laboratory component where students experiment with an industry grade commercial Lidar device and learn hands-on about its features and performance.
| |
|
The Global Automotive and Mobility Industry MSU-CIBER
This presentation reports on the services provided by The International Business Center that assists businesses, policy makers, academia and students on international business and trade in support of Michigan's automotive industry.
| |
|
General Motors and PG&E recently announced they are working together on a pilot program that would allow an electric vehicle (EV) to power a customer’s home during an outage. The initiative uses bidirectional charging which would allow power to be pulled from the EV into something else, such as an EV owner’s home during a power outage.
The pilot hopes to be testing this concept in homes this summer in California. A successful pilot could also help support California’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and introduce yet another advantage of EVs.
| |
|
The state of Utah recently installed 35 thermal imaging cameras to help identify vehicles that are driving the wrong way on a road with the hopes of preventing what are often devastating head on collisions.
The cameras can detect when heat from a vehicle is going in the opposite direction as other traffic and sends an alert to the Utah Department of Transportation’s traffic operations center. The traffic operations center then flashes a message to right way traffic via electronic road signs.
| |
Inductive Vehicle Charging | |
|
The first wireless electric vehicle (EV) charging road in the United States will be built near Detroit’s historic Michigan Central Station which will soon serve as the centerpiece of a new mobility innovation district. Ford saved the historic building from destruction with plans to make the area a hub for the mobility industry in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood.
The Michigan Department of Transportation awarded to Electreon the contract to build the first public, wireless, in-road charging system in the country. EVs will be able to charge both while driving and while standing or parked. Development of the electric road system (ERS) is part of the state’s inductive vehicle charging pilot program.
| |
NHTSA Updates Guidance on Driverless Vehicles | |
|
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration today issued a final rule to ensure the safety of passengers in driverless vehicles, or those that do not have traditional manual controls that are commonly associated with a human driver such as a steering wheel. The rule also clarifies what is required of OEMs when applying the standards to driverless vehicles. Specifically, manufacturers must maintain the same level of occupant protection as they currently do with traditional vehicles.
View or download the Occupant Protection for Vehicles With Automated Driving Systems rule.
Visit the NHTSA Automated Vehicles for Safety webpage which includes an infographic explaining the levels of automation.
| |
History Making Women of the Automotive Industry | |
|
Women have served as trailblazers in the automotive industry since 1886. For women’s history month, let’s take a look at just 8 of the trailblazing women who helped make the automobile itself and the automotive industry what it is today:
-
Bertha Benz helped bring the first automobile to life back in 1886 and was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2016.
-
Margaret Wilcox came up with the idea of having a heating system to warm the vehicle in 1893.
-
Helene Rother Ackernecht in 1942 became one of the first females to work as an automotive designer at General Motors. In 1948, she was the first woman to address the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2020.
-
Mary Anderson came up with the idea for windshield wipers in 1902, but unfortunately never profited from her idea.
-
Denise McCluggage was a reporter who later began competing and winning as a professional race car driver. She later became a founder and editor of America’s first motorsports weekly, called the Competition Press which later became Autoweek.
-
Leilani Münter is a female racecar driver and environmental activist who recorded 9 top-five, 21 top-ten, and 37 top-fifteen finishes in nearly as many starts. Due to her environmental activism, Discovery’s Planet Green named her the number one eco athlete in the world.
-
Lisa Drake has held a variety of high-level positions at Ford, including Global Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Chief Engineer, Vice President of Global Purchasing, Chief Operating Officer of North America, and now is Vice President of Electric Vehicle Industrialization, Ford Model e. She was also accepted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.
-
Mary Barra is currently one of the most influential women in the world—in any industry—as the Chair and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors. The first woman to lead a “Big 3” auto company, she has served as CEO of GM since 2014 and has helped GM move towards a zero-emissions future with a goal of being all electric by 2035. Under Barra’s leadership, GM has invested billions in the development of electric and self-driving cars.
Read more about these trailblazing women and watch a video of Mary Barra’s first ride in a driverless vehicle by viewing the full article.
| |
The United States leads the world in self-driving car readiness with 50 autonomous vehicle companies located here. | |
GM plans to make 400,000 EVs in North America through 2023, including restarting the Chevy Bolt. | |
Ford wants to provide electric vehicles to small business owners, like plumbers and electricians, to help with repairs, financing, and charging. | |
While hauling water downhill, electric trucks could utilize their regenerative brakes to charge the truck's battery. | |
|
…Michigan will receive $110 million to expand the state’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure?
The formula funds will come over a 5-year period from the recently passed Federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration will invest a total of $5 billion in formula funding across the country to build the first-ever national network of EV chargers.
| | | | |
