The Solar Car Team took advantage of the warm, sunny day last week by going to the workspace to drive the car. The weekend’s workspace session was mostly geared towards making sure that all of the team members are familiar with the car. The engineering division reviewed and conducted the procedures to make sure the car is in ship-shape condition for team members to operate it safely.

Several new members of the strategy division were given an introduction in following the solar car in a “chase vehicle”. While in the chase vehicle (which is a regular car that follows the solar car), strategists focused on making sense of the telemetry information coming from the solar car. This information is communicated wirelessly and is displayed on a laptop that is carried within the chase vehicle. These numbers that are communicated to the laptop through specially designed computer software give the strategy division information regarding the solar car’s speed, energy intake, and energy output. The program also suggests the optimal speed at which to drive the solar car to maximize efficiency, given the weather conditions. However, a program’s analytical abilities can only do so much and is no substitute for the judgment of a good strategist. That’s why it is especially important that the strategy team members analyze the car in motion many times. In the end, the software is just a supplement to the most important thing a strategist can posses: intuition.

As the team relaxes before the start of the race, the Strategists are finishing last minute preparations for the race. Jordan is forecasting weather while Danyang and Andrew are analyzing race simulation results. Beth is working on getting new weather hardware that just arrived from Climatronics. Despite uncertainties in strategy simulations and forecasts, one thing is certain: tomorrow should be an interesting day of racing.

Strategy Discussion: Jordan and Andrew review weather forecasts and simulation results.

New Hardware: This sonimeter should provide accurate wind speed measurements for Strategists in Chase and Weather.

I considered software programming and management to be a benign job–you know, a bug or two won’t hurt anyone, right? I’ve had the guilty pleasure of thinking that one solution to a programming error is to just hide it from sight and hope it never comes out again. Until now, it pretty much worked. However, after joining the Solar Car Team, I’m starting to see past the bubble of class project specifications.

In the world of solar car racing, the project specification is simple but hard: make it work; no exceptions, no assumptions. The programs that run for this team do not just execute for a couple of minutes to pass test cases; they run for days on end. The database keeping the telemetry of the solar car and the weather forecasts are crucial in determining the solar car’s operation. For example, the data from survey runs tell the team what the solar car will be facing in the road ahead, and the weather data is important in deciding the optimal battery power for the solar car. A single crash in this database could decide our fate, and I am here to make sure that does not happen. The weight cannot be any greater, but I’m ready to move my residence from a bubble to a….chase car!

After spending the previous day performing tests at the Royal Flying Doctor Service’s emergency landing airstrip, we set out this morning for Adelaide and the finish of our Mock Race. Our starting location was approximately 50 km north of Glendambo, leaving us around 670 km (418 mi) from the finish of timing outside Adelaide. We started at 8:00 AM with sunny skies at last–quite a relief after the weather of previous days.

Although we had only a small amount of energy left from the three cloudy days before, along with a threat of more clouds in the afternoon, we were able to cruise at over 90-95 km/hr (56-59 mph) in the morning. Thanks to the forecasts of our meteorologist, Chris McMeeking, we were able to track the clouds well ahead of Infinium. In the afternoon, when we were sure that we would not run into significant cloud cover, we started to cruise near the speed limit of 110 km/hr (69 mph). After three days of miserable weather, it was encouraging to be able to travel closer to race speeds.

We hit our control points in Glendambo and Port Augusta, and finished at the end of timing outside Adelaide with time to spare before the end of the race day. Best of all, we had perfect reliability on the car, with no time on the side of the road! Each of the divisions on our Race Crew truly deserves praise for their part in today’s success: Engineering, for ensuring the car was reliable enough to last through the grueling mock race; Strategy, for tracking such unpredictable weather and managing our batteries through the cloudy days; and Operations, for keeping our whole team going through five long days and four nights in the Outback’s ever-changing conditions.

With exactly three weeks until the Global Green Challenge starts, we have readied Infinium and ourselves for the trials of the Outback and will now turn our focus to the final details of our race preparations.

-Steve Hechtman, Race Manager

On Tuesday, Alex Dowling and I were kindly given the opportunity to attend the Intelligent Transportation Society – Michigan’s annual meeting and exposition. Held at the Rock Financial Showplace in Novi, the conference featured several speakers from various backgrounds, exhibits by companies working with all aspects of intelligent transportation technology, and some pretty nifty demos.

We spoke with companies that make sensors that will relay info about traffic conditions, intersection issues, and hazards to an operator or to other vehicles on the road. Others made intelligent traffic lights that will change their timing based on the nature of the traffic flow at the time. There were weather sensors that are placed in the pavement to report when road conditions may become slippery, and companies such as Motorola that featured communication solutions.

It was a beautiful day, so naturally we were drawn outside to the demos. A truck by Ford and Sprint featured a built-in computer with internet access. MDOT showed vehicles with vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, the code for which was partially written by team alumni. As we were driven around the block in one of these vans, a screen informed us how long we had to wait before the red light in front of us would turn green and, later, that an emergency vehicle was approaching.

The conference was a great opportunity to network with professionals and to learn about some really cool technology. Thanks very much to the coordinators for allowing us to attend.

- Rachel Kramer, Interim Strategy Director

This afternoon Dylan Keefe-Reitzell (Race Crew Aerodynamicist), Santosh Kumar (Race Crew Strategist) and I met with Brock Palen from the Center for Advanced Computing in the College of Engineering. Brock showed us how we can utlitize some of the CAC’s 3000+ computing cores to decrease computational time and increase complexity of our aerodynamic analysis and strategy optimizations. We were also happy to learn that Brock is a team alumni from the SpectrUM (2003) and MomentUM (2005) projects. We eagerly listened as he shared his past experiences on the team with us.

-Alex Dowling, Infinium Strategy Director and Head Strategist