The United States space program has been without a launch vehicle for human spaceflight since 2011. That was when the space shuttle Atlantis returned on its final flight. Since then, NASA has relied on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to take its astronauts to the International Space Station. However, if all goes to plan this could soon change, as two private companies are working with NASA to launch the first astronauts into orbit. The companies, SpaceX and Boeing, are building crew capsules and rockets, designing space suits, and training astronauts to fly these new vehicles into space.

Since this is the last issue of the DSC magazine in its current form, this article is a chance to look back over the years and reflect on what the magazine offered over that time.

Small rotorcraft unmanned air vehicles (sUAVs) are valuable tools in solving geospatial inspection challenges. One area where this is being widely explored is disaster reconnaissance [ 1 ]. Using sUAVs to collect images provides engineers and government officials critical information about the conditions before and after a disaster [ 2 ]. This is accomplished by creating high- fidelity 3D models from the sUAV’s imagery. However, using an sUAV to perform inspections is a challenging task due to constraints on the vehicle’s flight time, computational power, and data storage capabilities [ 3 ]. The approach presented in this article illustrates a method for utilizing multiple sUAVs to inspect a disaster region and merge the separate data into a single high-resolution 3D model.

Electric and autonomous vehicles will change the layout and rhythm of our lives. Entwined with this story of change are the fuels and forms of energy we used to enable the engines and motors to propel us forward. In this excerpt from his upcoming book, noted energy expert Michael Webber makes the case that switching from oil to electricity for powering vehicles would cut transportation-related carbon emissions and create a pathway to quieter, zippier travel.

Making future vehicles intelligent with improved fuel economy and satisfactory emissions are the main drivers for current vehicle research and development. The connected and autonomous vehicles still need years or decades to be widely used in practice. However, some advanced technologies have been developed and deployed for the conventional vehicles to improve the vehicle performance and safety, such as adaptive cruise control (ACC), automatic parking, automatic lane keeping, active safety, super cruise, and so on. On the other hand, the vehicle propulsion system technologies, such as clean and high efficiency combustion, hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), and electric vehicle, are continuously advancing to improve fuel economy with satisfactory emissions for traditional internal combustion engine powered and hybrid electric vehicles or to increase cruise range for electric vehicles.

The new data sharing network that defines so many technical applications would be almost impossible without 5G. Because it transmits data more efficiently, 5G has the potential to be 40 times faster and suffer shorter lag times than the current 4G standard. That speed is critical for autonomous cars, where timely decisions need to be made to avoid crashes. In this article, learn how 5G will impact automotive and a host of new technical applications.

This article emphasizes on the role engineering plays in the existence and working of any civilization. The power of engineering is that it provides the foundation for further advancements. That enables access to natural resources, the access increases the potential for human freedom and creativity, and that freedom allows for the creation of new engineering advances. The engineered contrivances are diverse—coming in many sizes and configurations, being as ancient as rope or as new as self-driving vehicles—and at first sight appear complicated, disorganized. Access to more power—that is, the ability to move across space, in opposition to the forces that oppose motion—due to the application of engines touched off an explosion in new contrivances. It is only when access to the fruits of engineering is severed, due to earthquakes and hurricanes or accidents and acts of despotism that most people become aware of the monumental role that engineering plays in our lives today. Today, biomedical engineers are working to improve and extend lives. They are part of an engineering tradition that extends for millennia.

This article focuses on efforts by automotive manufacturers and engineering students towards developing autonomous vehicles. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has defined different levels of autonomy (SAE J3016 standard), to describe how automated a vehicle is, which have also been adopted by the US Department of Transportation. The purpose of SAE and General Motors (GM) in designing and implementing hands-on engineering design and conducting technology-focused collegiate competition with an emphasis on autonomous driving and the associated technologies´ is to provide a professional development and educational experience for undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at selected universities. SAE and its sponsors are supporting the competition with training and mentoring. Students are also learning how to work in interdisciplinary teams, which has its own issues. Different academic disciplines approach problems differently, use different techniques, and sometimes even seem to speak a different language. Another important thing about the Challenge is that it lets them see how their courses impact real engineering problems. Students taking a controls course see plenty of Laplace transforms and all sorts of plots—root-locus plots, perhaps Nyquist plots or Bode plots, time domain response plots—but they may not always realize how this links up to real life.

This article describes features of FIRST, an approach to introduce science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) concepts to students. One unique aspect of the FIRST experience is that the reward and recognition for achievements are not necessarily gained on the field of play—excellence in design, demonstrated team spirit, Gracious Professionalism, community outreach, and more are recognized with awards. The focus of organized FIRST programs is on pre-college students {LE Comment: Please check whether the introduction of a preposition is required.}. At the college level, there are no formal FIRST programs, except for FIRST-related scholarships. However, as shown in the longitudinal study, the impact of FIRST carries into postsecondary education. There are diverse types of FIRST-related organizations and models at the college level. The article also highlights that during the semester, a sequence of team building, mentoring, project management, fundraising, and FIRST robot design topics are given by faculty, senior FIRST mentors, and professional engineers.

This article presents details of a report on new and future trends in trucking. According to the report, fleet owners may quickly adopt electronic vehicles (EV) for medium-haul routes. In November 2017, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the design for a battery-powered semi that could travel 500 miles on a single charge. According to Musk, the company would begin producing the trucks in 2019. The report highlighted the regional light-duty delivery market in Europe, where fuel costs are higher than in the United States. Designing vehicles and business models around the capabilities of electric powertrains—capabilities that differ from those of diesel trucks—are expected to enable battery-electric trucks to penetrate the market more quickly.

This article presents advancements in the development of battery-powered vehicles and the comparison between battery-powered vehicles and internal combustion engine. With its SkyActiv-X, a homogenous charge compression ignition engine, Mazda hopes to improve fuel economy by as much as 20%. A 2016 study by Arthur D. Little, the international consulting firm, comparing battery electric vehicles (BEV) against internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV) stated, ‘the ultimate environmental and economic reality of electric vehicles is far more complicated than their promise.’ The study showed BEVs enjoy economic advantages. The electricity cost associated with operating BEVs over a distance of one mile is significantly lower than the cost of gasoline over the same distance for a conventional car. The report shows that most of the environmental impacts generated by ICEVs are localized to the combustion of gasoline in the engine; however, the BEV manufacturing process ‘generates a much more widely dispersed and damaging set of environmental impacts.’

This article discusses the basic concept of connected and automated vehicles (CAV) technology. The common methods to improve fuel economy are also introduced. The effects of connectivity on vehicle/powertrain control and optimization are also elaborated. The Michigan Tech NEXTCAR project is also presented to provide a more detailed view of predictive vehicle/powertrain control enabled by CAV technologies. The U.S. Department of transportation (DOT) and other federal/state funding agencies have supported research and pilot deployment efforts to develop crosscutting CV technologies and evaluate the effectiveness of CV technologies in real-world transportation systems. The concurrent development of connected and automated vehicle technologies is anticipated to provide synergistic benefits to improve traffic safety, mobility, and energy efficiency. It is observed that increased CAV technologies are being deployed in real-world transportation systems.

This article demonstrates several approaches to the vehicle energy consumption and tailpipe emission reduction opportunities. The article leverages the vehicle storage dynamics through smart and personalized optimization and control approaches in the context of connected vehicles. Recent advances in vehicle connectivity and automation have brought unprecedented information richness and new degrees of freedom that can be synergized with insightful understanding of vehicle powertrain and aftertreatment physical systems. Vehicle automation also provides new degrees of freedom that can be further leveraged by the vehicle control systems to improve vehicle energy efficiency and reduce tailpipe emissions. While vehicle automation levels probably will keep increasing, humans will still be involved in vehicle operations at various levels for the foreseeable future. The prediction of future vehicle’s power demand based on vehicle connectivity can significantly benefit tailpipe emission reductions and fuel economy.

This article discusses the potential of using autonomous and connected vehicle (CV) technologies to save energy. It also focuses on the potential energy savings of internal combustion engine-based vehicles (ICVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). An example of vehicle and powertrain co-optimization for HEV eco-approaching and departure is also given. CV technologies are gaining increasing attention around the world. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication enable real-time access to traffic information that was not available before, including preceding vehicles’ location, speed, pedal position, traffic signal phasing and timing (SPaT). The example shown in this article demonstrates the potential benefits from vehicle and powertrain co-optimization by investigating an eco-approaching and departure application. More research in this area can offer more mature solutions to implement such optimization in a real-production vehicle.

This article discusses the future of autonomous cars and its impact on the society in the future. The engineering community is building a future and is focused on making autonomous vehicles safe, efficient, and attractive to use. Autonomous transport of goods will allow a complete reimagination of the future of the global supply chain. AARP’s interest is important for another reason: the elderly vote; and if they want self-driving cars, lawmakers will quickly tackle some of the thorniest policy hurdles—such as regulation, local traffic laws, and insurance. The future of autonomous cars is expected to change lives in both dramatic and subtle ways, but the ways that will be most interesting are the things that are forgotten, the things that the next generation deem useless and frivolous. Google's self-driving car is a street-legal vehicle; however, autonomous golf carts might be more practical. Experts believe that the most interesting changes that will be brought by autonomous cars will be the cultural shifts.

This article focuses on the research and development work at the Eclipse Research Cluster at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) to address cybersecurity challenges. The research team is seeking to address cybersecurity challenges by employing a diverse set of specialty areas including Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. This group is looking at leveraging physical relationships to provide a diversity of measurement and reporting to not only improve anomaly detection, but also make decisions about how to keep critical functions operating even if only in a degraded mode. By exploiting the physical relationships between pressing a brake pedal and the operator’s leg position and the power consumption of a sensor and the instructions being run in it, this group proposes to provide new indicators that can be used to increase resilience to cyberattacks. This concept describes an example for a small section of a typical vehicle system. This group’s future research is seeking to expand this general approach of using the physical relationships of sensors to the properties they are measuring or actuators and the cause or effect of their action.

This article focuses on dynamics and control of connected and automated vehicles. The complexity and difficulty can grow significantly from low automation levels to higher levels. The paper briefly highlights three challenges, i.e., sensing, localization, and perception. The Mobility Transformation Center (MTC) is a public/private research and development partnership led by the University of Michigan. MTC aims to develop the foundations for a viable ecosystem of CAVs. A popular alternative to test high-automation-level AVs is the Naturalistic-Field Operational Test (N-FOT). In an N-FOT, a number of equipped vehicles are tested under naturalistic driving conditions over an extended period. In the near future, connected and automated vehicle technologies are expected to be deployed rapidly. While there has been a lot of research in, and attention to, the field of sensing, localization, and perception, this paper aims to point out a few areas related to the field of dynamics and control that are opportunities for further research.

This article emphasizes the need to update Ukraine’s end-to-end electric power grid to provide secure, resilient, and reliable electricity for the future. More than any other publicized attack, the Ukrainian attack demonstrated the sophistication of today’s hackers and the malware they now wield. Despite the risks, policymakers nationwide are pushing for clean and reliable electricity. Grid managers count on either in-house meteorologists or third-party vendors to determine the most accurate weather forecast. A self-healing smart grid needs to be supported by secure sensing and communication networks, it needs built-in computational technologies, and it has to be controllable in real time. In order to protect the electrical system from both cyber and physical attacks, each of its components could in theory be replaced or retrofitted. The expert suggests that the sensing and communication technology on far-flung grid elements would give command-and-control centers better situational awareness; they could use this to plan for future conditions.

This article presents evaluation results of connected vehicles and their applications. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2I) can enable a new paradigm of vehicle applications. The connected vehicle applications could significantly improve vehicle safety, mobility, energy savings, and productivity by utilizing real-time vehicle and traffic information. In the foreseeable future, connected vehicles need to operate alongside unconnected vehicles. This makes the evaluation of connected vehicles and their applications challenging. The hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed can be used as a tool to evaluate the connected vehicle applications in a safe, efficient, and economic fashion. The HIL testbed integrates a traffic simulation network with a powertrain research platform in real time. Any target vehicle in the traffic network can be selected so that the powertrain research platform will be operated as if it is propelling the target vehicle. The HIL testbed can also be connected to a living laboratory where actual on-road vehicles can interact with the powertrain research platform.

This article presents an insight into innovations in the field of bioenergy crops. In order to get the most biofuel from the least land, farmers must maximize the yield of raw plant material per acre per year, while using a minimum of fertilizer and chemicals. To rapidly develop crops that do so, sorghum breeders and other scientists want to identify the traits or phenotypes that predict which plants will be biggest and have the most biomass to convert into fuel. Such phenotypes may include early season growth rates, the number of leaves on a plant, how well it uses soil nutrients, and many more. Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture-funded team plan to monitor a diverse array of genes and traits in thousands of individual sorghum plants from the ground and the air. They are using robots, UAVs, sensing technologies, and big data to make that happen. In order to monitor crops from the ground, both the Purdue team and Clemson University’s ARPA-E BOOST team are developing self-driving, instrument-equipped bots or vehicles that steer themselves through a breeding plot without trampling plants.