Issue date: 5/4/07 Section: News

Four engineering seniors joined forces to compete in a competition where they designed technology to make vehicles more safe.

Four Cal Poly students have taken their senior project to the international level by making it to the final round of the Collegiate Student Safety Technology Design Competition held in Lyon, France, June 18 to 21.

The competition is part of the biennial Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference, designed to showcase the latest vehicle safety innovations from around the world.

Mechanical engineering seniors Danny Murphy, D.J. Parsons and Justin Carpenter teamed up with computer engineering senior Duane Howard to create their project entitled "System Integration of a Pre-Crash and Crash Test Avoidance Vehicle." The focus of their enterprise is a cart which uses a combination of pre-crash and collision avoidance technologies; if the cart is unable to avoid the accident it is capable of measures to lessen the impact.

"This project has been an interesting experience; our final product is something useful that is helping work towards safer vehicles, which is important," Howard said.

With the help of mechanical engineering professors Charles Birdsong and Peter Schuster, the group was able to bring together data and resources from several previous senior projects to create their final vehicle.

Since 2004, senior projects under the supervision of these professors have tested a variety of sensors, including LIDAR and RADAR sensors, created sensor filtering algorithms and built a test vehicle capable of using the sensors to enhance safety.

"The sensors that our cart utilizes are already built into most vehicles; technology like this would be easy to implement," Murphy said.

This senior project was responsible for bringing it all together by programming the algorithms for the sensors into the vehicle. The cart displays autonomous warning and braking and an airbag deployment 10 to 20 milliseconds prior to impact.

"Different senior projects all completed different tasks; we basically put the brain into the car," Parsons said.

After a project demonstration to three representatives visiting campus from the U.S. Department of Transportation on March 19, this group was one of three North American teams chosen to compete against seven other regional winners in France. Other North American finalists include Stanford University and Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

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