AUTOCOM
The automotive area is a vital industry sector with an important economic contribution in Europe. Automotive Control and Mechatronics is becoming essential in today’s and tomorrow’s road vehicles for improved road transport safety, reduced pollutant emission levels and fuel economy. Road vehicles are, therefore, becoming truly mechatronic devices loaded with sensors and actuators and control code in a large number of electronic control units, connected over a data bus. There is also a trend towards inter-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure communication for improved safety and comfort. Consequently, Europe’s current leading position in the automotive sector relies heavily on its taking part in and leading the anticipated developments in the Automotive Control and Mechatronics area.
This project is on contributing to European Research and Technology Development in the Automotive Control and Mechatronics area in order to help achieve safer, cleaner and fuel efficient road vehicles in Europe. The aim of this project is to make the Automotive Controls Research Group (ACRG) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at İstanbul Technical University (İTÜ) an excellent Automotive Controls and Mechatronics (Acronym: AUTOCOM) Center for Actively Safe, Clean and Efficient Road Vehicles with an increased research and technological development (RTD) capacity and a higher level of participation in EU funded research activities.
For this purpose, three thrust areas of research capacity reinforcement have been identified as:
- preventive and active safety control systems.
- powertrain modeling, control and hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) testing.
- hybrid electric vehicle modeling and control.
The project addresses "integrating" and "strengthening" the ERA in the eSafety subpriority of the IST thematic priority area and the Transport and Integrated Safety subpriorities of the SustDev thematic priority area of Framework Programme 6.
The AUTOCOM center project was one of the successful projects in the FP6-ACC-SSA-2 call for proposals of the EU FP6 program. There were 371 proposals that were submitted to this call from the three associated candidate countries: Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. Out of these 371 proposals, 346 of them were eligible and were evaluated. The distribution of proposals was: 138 from Turkey (11 being successful), 118 from Romania (8 being successful) and 90 from Bulgaria (7 being successful). The AUTOCOM project proposal placed 2nd out of the 11 proposals from Turkey that were selected for funding, with an evaluation score of 23.5/25 and very positive evaluation remarks. The AUTOCOM center project will last 36 months. The project contract was signed by the EU commission on February 18, 2005. The project will start officially on May 1, 2005. The total budget for the project is 600,000.- Euro.
We are currently recruiting for the two post-doctoral researcher, three doctoral students or engineer and one management and exploitation assistant positions available through the duration of the project. Interested candidates should check the vacancies part of our web page. We offer very interesting and challenging positions with competitive stipends.
We are currently planning our first workshop that will be held in Istanbul during September 19-20. This workshop will be on Active Automotive Safety Control Systems. Along with regular presentations, we will have invited talks and sessions to foster EU FP joint proposal submissions. Officials from the related EU FP offices will also be invited.
We will be collaborating with five EU and one US center of excellence in the automotive controls and mechatronics area.
The Rector of Istanbul Technical University, Prof.Dr. Faruk Karadogan is signing the contract preparation forms (Vice Rector in charge of EU projects Prof.Dr. Erkin Nasuf and Asst.Prof.Dr. Bilin Aksun Guvenc and Prof.Dr. Levent Guvenc in the background)
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