ThreeÌýÀ¶Ý®ÊÓƵÌýEngineering students have returned from France with a prize of 10,000 euros in their back pockets, thanks to an invention that helps vehicles communicate with each other to enhance passenger safety.
The team called ThreeÌýVeMAColleagues,Ìýcomprised of electrical andÌýcomputer engineeringÌýdoctoral candidatesÌýSailesh Bharati, Ning LuÌýandÌý
VeMAC, the À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ Engineering team's vehicle-to-vehicle networking program,Ìýcan produce safer cars using wireless communication among vehicles nearby each other or roadside units.
After submitting the team's idea, the members were selected among the top 20 teams out of 969 from 450 universities and 55 different countries.Ìý
After months of creating and testing the program, writing reports and preparing a mock-up presentation, the À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ Engineering team was selected as one of the seven finalists. Members of the seven short-listed teams travelled to Paris in October to present their projects to the contest jury, consisting of scientists, astronauts, economists, and Valeo board members.
Real world implementation
Before the challenge, the students who are allÌýmembers of electrical and computer engineering's Broadband Communications Research GroupÌýhad only tested VeMAC using computer simulators and mathematical analysis. TheÌýValeo Innovation ChallengeÌýprovided the opportunity to try it out using real experiments.Ìý
"The challenge allowed us to bring our ideas from the technical papers to the real world implementation. We were very glad to feel that a big industrial organization likeÌýValeoÌýis interested in and supporting our innovation," says Omar, now a postdoctoral researcher.
The students are supervised by electrical and computer engineering professors WeihuaÌýZhaung and Sherman Shen who provided support throughout the competition.