From March 12-13 and 19-20, teams participated in the EcoCAR Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) Testing Event at the Transportation Research Center (TRC). TRC invited teams to test run the Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) Enabled Energy Consumption and the Connected Mobility Challenge events at their world-class vehicle testing facility in preparation for the vehicle dynamic testing events at the Year 4 Competition in May.
Amine Taoudi, the Mississippi State University (MSU) Propulsion Controls and Modeling Lead, attended Week 2 of the event and was excited to test the integrated MSU Chevrolet Blazer.
“The year 4 Spring CAV testing at TRC event has allowed us to test our perception, adaptive cruise control and V2I systems,” said Taoudi. “The TRC testing facilities and the test plans that Argonne has put together provided us with the perfect environment to stress test our system and find ways to improve our design,” he added.
Teams had a chance to test at a connected intersection with real-time time Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT)/Map information by driving their vehicles through an intersection setup for various SPaT configurations. The students were able to verify functionality of Vehicle to Everything (V2X) systems on board their vehicles.
“We were able to complete adaptive cruise control drive cycles as well as drive though connected intersections. The data collected from these tests will be analyzed by our team so we can prepare for competition,” said Taoudi.
Priyash Misra, AVTC Organizer and Advanced Mobility Research Engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, helped plan and organize the EcoCAR CAV Testing Event at TRC.
“This event gave teams a valuable opportunity to utilize a world-class testing facility to exercise their propulsion system and CAV features. Teams were able to dry run the AC-Enabled Energy Consumption test to understand how the test would operate and learn how their vehicles will respond to the test procedure,” said Misra.
Teams were able to take away valuable lessons learned from this pre-competition testing activity. Most notably, many teams discovered that the test track guardrail was confusing their vehicle’s perception system during testing. This will allow teams to improve their system to address this scenario.
The students are now back at their respective universities and are preparing for the upcoming Year 4 Competition in May. Be sure to follow along on our channels to check on the teams’ progress.
Photos from the EcoCAR CAV Testing Event at TRC can be found HERE.
