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Notes from Stuttgart

PaulG 45
June 30 2009
0

Last week was rather crazy…

Monday afternoon, I’m sitting in a canoe on a beautiful lake in the wilds of Ontario…

…Tuesday morning, I’m in Stuttgart for the Vehicle Dynamics Expo to introduce MapleSim 2 to the many automotive engineers that have converged from just about every European nation, and beyond, to learn about new technologies and methodologies for the design of vehicle chassis systems, including  suspensions, steering, tires (or tyres, depending where you come from), and braking systems.

HIL.JPG
HIL demonstration at Maplesoft booth
One hot topic of discussion is the rapid development of vehicle stability controllers, given that all new passenger vehicle designs must now by law include active stability control. This is very timely for us because we are able to show our hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) demonstration that includes a full-vehicle model developed in MapleSim and running on dSPACE and National Instruments PXI real-time platforms, with a MotoTron prototype controller interfaced to the vehicle model via a CANbus interface. I’ll describe this in more detail in a later blog post.

This is creating a great deal of interest both at the booth of our German partner, Scientific Computers, and at the presentation I gave on Wednesday at the Technical Forum. In fact, given the number of engineers of different nationalities that we demonstrated MapleSim to, I have learned that there is one word that has the same meaning in any language: “Wow!”

Yours truly giving a presentation at the show
On a more sober note, the show itself was significantly quieter than previous years. Not surprising, given the devastating effect of the global recession. This got me reflecting on the viability of the automotive industry as a market in which to do business. My conclusion is that there will always be an automotive industry, no matter the turmoil it is going through now, and it is an industry that needs to innovate to overcome the economic, legislative and competitive challenges it faces. And while it has that need, there will always be a need for tools like ours.

So, while the numbers are down this year for many of the players in the industry, those people we did meet were very optimistic about the growing need for advanced research, and that tools like Maple and MapleSim are firmly in their plans for the very near future.

If you need references about the ESC legislation, here’s the stuff about the US…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/portal/site/nhtsa/menuitem.012c081c5966f0ca3253ab10cba046a0/

and here’s Europe…

http://www.fiabrussels.com/en/news/archive/fia_pushes_for_more_action_on_electronic_stability_control.htm

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