'Bee-R' ITU Formula SAE Car's Mechanical Design
ITU Formula SAE Team, which is Turkey's first Formula SAE Team, was founded in 2006. Our target was to take the initiative to start Formula SAE in Turkey and produce a car for the 2007 Formula SAE Italy event. However, due to the difficulties of making the university's and also the country’s first Formula SAE car, the efforts failed to design a producible one. In October 2007, remaining members of the team, mostly consisting of second year students and two M.Sc. students, started to work on a new design.
Due to our very small team and bureaucratic procedures, our work slowed. In the Spring of 2010 we, as ten students from different engineering branches, completed Turkey’s first Formula SAE Car. After four years of lasting faith and commitment to complete the project, we entered the Formula SAE Michigan 2010.
In this project, as we were only a few members, I (and also the other members) worked on almost the entire mechanical design. However, the chassis and suspension design were in my responsibility.
After attending Formula SAE Michigan 2010, as the designers of the first car, we founded a completely new team for the design and production of a new F-SAE car for the future events. We also left the team leadership to a freshman student in order to establish a new team, but providing them with experience and knowledge. Although, we as the founding members are not in the team anymore, we all are trying to mentor the teams in fields where guidance is needed.
ITU Formula SAE Team is now designing its second car to compete in the Formula Student Germany. Formula SAE (or Formula Student in Europe, Formula ATA in Italy) is a student design competition organized by SAE. ITU Formula SAE Team is determined to produce a powerful car for the Formula-ATA, 2013 Event. More information about the ITU Formula SAE Team can be gathered from the team's web page.
MEKAR Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge Vehicle's Automatic Brake & Gas System Design
The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) is an international challenge that aims to accelerate the development of cooperative driving technologies. Cooperative driving aims to form platoons of vehicles on the roadways by having the cars communicate with each other and with the infrastructure. By transmitting the vehicle's acceleration information to the vehicles behind it, the vehicles inside a platoon will be able to brake and accelerate simultaneously. The eliminated human reaction times will allow a closer headway between vehicles and thereby reducing it significantly. Hence, with the use of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), a more efficient use of existing infrastructure alleviating traffic problems and reduced fuel consumption will be achieved.
The GCDC is held by TNO in the Netherlands on the 14th and 15th of May. Team MEKAR has challenged its rivals with its half-autonomous car and placed 7 th overall and 5thin the individual category. It was a good rank for us as we did not have any autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles which we could easily equip with the neccessary hardware and software required for the C-ACC. The vehicle we had developed was not fitted with an OEM Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), so we also had to deal with incorporating ACC into the vehicle, which most of the other teams had as stock on their vehicles. Our vehicle was intrinsically very sluggish due to its heavy weight, exceeding 1700kg with the equipment installed, compared with the IC engine of power of 90 hp (67kW). Besides the low hp/1000kg ratio, the delays during the shifting were also relatively high due to the tiptronic shift, which made our vehicle even slower. More information about our MEKAR GCDC Vehicle can be found on the IEEE Transactions on ITS GCDC Special Issue.
Team Mekar's GCDC vehicle is a Fiat Linea sedan provided by our major automotive OEM sponsor Tofaş-Fiat for use during the race. Istanbul Okan University, İstanbul Technical University and OTAM (Automotive Technologies Research and Development Company) were our main sponsors for the GCDC event. I was responsible for designing a closed loop control system needed for braking and accelerating purposes by forming the necessary longitudinal vehicle model, and the mechanical design needed for sensor, actuator etc. mountings. Mechanical design had a constraint that we had to make the changes on the car without drilling any holes or making any weldments. I was the only undergraduate student in this project, and my senior design project covered controller integration by using a rapid controller prototyper (we were using Microautobox) and performing road tests.
Online estimation of driving resistance parameters
I took as a student researcher part in a research project between Dr.-Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG and KIT - Institute of Vehicle System Technology. The goal of this project was to estimate the unknown driving resistance parameters by the use of online filters.
My advisor in this project Ph.D. Stephan Rhode was researching online filters and performed test-runs to investigate the quality of the developed vehicle models. Acquired data from the vehicle CAN-Bus thereby allowed accurate range prediction and a better driving strategy selection
In this project, I provided assistance to my advisor in post-processing for roughly four months. Especially creating codes in MATLAB for various filter types, plotting figures which could serve for the ease of model selection, improving the visualization of figures, and literature review about the topic were my duties.
Gearbox and Coupling Design
As a mechanical engineer, I had to design some gearboxes, shafts, HVAC-systems etc. Interested readers can access the designs of some from the links below:
'HaydARI' Minisumo Robot Design
A sumo robot's task is to push the robot that it is competing with to outside of a circle. Mini-sumo robot is a category of the sumo robots. They can be up to 500 grams and 10 cm by 10 cm without any height limit. Sumo robot competitions are held worldwide with Japan being the pioneer. I had prepared a mini-sumo robot for METU Robotic Days in 2007. Because it was my first robot with which I took part in a competition, it has a special place for me.
To determine the position of the opponent robot, five Sharp 2D150A F IR sensors were used, with there of them looking forward. The neccessary algorithms were written on ANSI C and were implemented on a PIC16F628 microcontroller. To overcome the 10 cm x 10 cm restriction, the robot was designed to expand after the start by opening its front plate.