Welcome to the latest edition of Reimagined Mobility Podcast series. I'm here with Darrel Robinette. You say that, right? Yes. All right. Very good. Want to make sure it's right. He works at M2, but you also have a history with GM in the transmission group. So I assume a mechanical engineer. Correct. Okay. So tell us a little bit your history. And how did you end up at a university? It's a well, I guess you got a few minutes here, right?
So I was born in southeast Michigan and always had this curious fascination with the way things work. It's a book, you know, I'm sure a lot of engineers still have it on their bookshelf today. My dad worked for Detroit Edison. He was a controls and instrumentation specialist in elementary school. He took me to the power plant. Is fascinated by everything there. Right. And the machinery was on scale. I mean, 1200 megawatt coal fired power plant.
I know that's probably a swear word today saying coal is what keeps the lights on for the most part in some areas of the country. But all the engineers that work there, the Detroit Edison and this particular power plant, Bell River, they're all Michigan Tech grads. And so, you know, fourth or fifth grade, you're talking to some of these engineers and like, oh, you should just go to Michigan Tech.
And that's where, you know, I guess the Michigan Tech, you know, going to school there, that that's where that came from. But my dad always told told my brother and I have one older brother, you know, we're going to go to college and, you know, and so I guess that's kind of the how to get to Michigan Tech. So then, of course, start at Michigan Tech. I'm only going to do an undergraduate degree. Well, then come comes along a girl. Right. And then.
All right, we'll stay a little bit longer for some graduate school. And a grad school project was funded by advanced Engineering Powertrain. GM. GM. Okay. Right. And all growing up, I always said I'm never going to go work for a car company. I don't want to work for a company car company because of the the strikes and the boom bust cycle. Well, this graduate project really provided a lot of insight on what making a car really is.
Yeah, it's a very, very deep technical process where you leverage everything you learn in engineering school. And oh, by the way, these car companies have all these resources to do really cool engineering. Right. And so, you know, grad school was like, fine, let's go work for, you know, GM posts, graduation. And that experience was just amazing. And I got to use a lot of your guys's dyno equipment, test equipment.
Right. Yeah. And so get very familiar with doing very standardized and even non standardized test procedures and dyno. Right. And so the latter part of your question, how do I end up from going in Michigan Tech to GM and then back to full. Circle, back again? Well, this girl that I met and you know, my wife now, she ended up going to med school at Michigan State and then doing residency at U of M and then she got a job right out of residency back at the hospital up by Michigan Tech.
Okay. So that's how I should probably follow. Right. And so Michigan Tech was they're very keen on bringing people back from industry because we learn a particular set of skills and we can relay that back to students so that when they join industry, they can hit the ground running. And so it's yeah, I guess it's the way it comes full circle. Yeah. And so now kind of get to give back to young engineers what was given to me by a lot of the faculty, you know, 20 some years ago.
Yeah. So. So how many how many students do you have that are in a similar position that you were that says car companies car, which I don't want to work their power plant. I want to go into aerospace, I want to go into whatever to do something and just just be open. Mind how many of those percentage wise, you know. Yeah, it's a shocking percentage. You know, cars for some students, cars today aren't as quote unquote sexy as rockets.
So we have a lot of students want to know go work for space X or this that or the other thing, aerospace. But for a number of students, we spend a lot of time convincing them that, look, there's a lot of really interesting things that are going in mobility systems that are very, very techie. Right? It's not, hey, I'm going to design gears. I'm going design pistons and connecting rods. Right.
That's there's still a place for that in automotive engineering, but similar like what we're doing on this project, it's coding, it's connectivity, it's automation, it's trying to fuse sensors together, trying to do control vehicles from the cloud. So we do have kind of an uphill battle convincing students to go work in mobility.
But once we connect them with folks in the mobility industry and they have their first taste of a, you know, podcast or their first internship or co-op, and then they're kind of hooked, really, Right? And we have really good hooks in with industry of the student design competitions like the say and GM auto drive competition that become magnets for for recruiting for students. And it also gives them an inside view.
You know, and I'll put you on the spot a little bit if you've got opportunities where we can put students in. Right, you're going to find that it's an amazing recruiting mechanism. We've experienced that in the past and and yet not just with empty. You obviously have other schools as well, but it's I think the key point you're making. I mean, I was in the same boat as you. My dad was working for Siemens in Europe. Yep. And and then worked for HP for 25 years in Europe.
That was I want to go into computer industry now. That sounds cool, you know. And then I graduated in Europe and I came over here, graduated here with another degree, and then girl as well with Michigan or in Detroit. And they said, I'll go up there with your languages, with your electronics degree background and all this stuff. Automotive is great. Automotive kind of want to work automotive. So so was the beginning in 1998 and 25 years later I'm still here.
And yeah, you never realized, I guess, how complex a vehicle really is, right? You see it and you see as an engineer and it has a transmission in it as if you electronics and but you really look at it from a system how complex it is, the different use cases, again, water, ice, all the different whatever you want to call them. Yeah, it is an amazing piece of technology, right? Yep. Yeah. And kind of what draws a lot of people in is like, okay, yeah, you can go.
Let's say you go work for I'm not going to maybe I shouldn't name company names, but let's say you go to a company X, Y, Z and they're making like printed circuit boards. Okay, You can, you can solve the technical issues there.
But what's really cool about mobility is if you solve those technical issues on that printed circuit board and your part has to go on a vehicle, cool, You can go get into that vehicle and experience what you've engineered and how you've added value to the customer or how you add it to solving, say, climate change, right? If you're working on electric mobility and you're passionate about that, right, you can go help solve a tangible problem to society and really feel like you're contributing.
And the other thing, right? It's a very expensive product. When people put down their dollars that are hard earned, they want that product to be robust and to meet their expectations. And you get to be part of that development process. Right. You know, I was at GM. I worked on transmission. Right. Well, transmission goes in a lot of different products. Well, there might be Corvette Camaro.
And those were the really fun products to work on or where you had the proving grounds and you're driving around, you're like as a pinch me moment of, you know, your job. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what is what is your passion today? Again, you talked obviously with kids working with students. I can clearly see and feel that. But from a from a technology side, are you still very much focused on transmissions? Are you taking a much higher approach and into system level type stuff or.
Yeah, that's a multifactorial question. There's the things that put, so to speak, bread on the table and that's working on kind of systems level engineering, which is just DOE project here at ACM or American Center for Mobility Testing and Validating is trying to take connected vehicle technologies and automation and fuse those two together over multiple vehicles and save energy, right? So holistic system, vehicle systems, transportation systems, viewpoint of trying to save energy. Right?
So that's kind of what puts bread on the table, so to speak, from a research standpoint right now, it fires me up from a passion standpoint, goes back to my roots that, you know, GM transmission engineering, where you like to work on the kinematics and dynamics of new power flows and how to go from electric motor to wheels and trying to solve that problem right.
And so that really doesn't you know, we don't have a lot of research projects in there because that problem's mostly solved by industry, you know, and from a proprietary standpoint. But it's really cool because you get to teach that in in class and pass that knowledge and ability to do, you know, transmission engineering or even systems engineering down to your students. Right? And so then they can go out to industry or other academic endeavors and use that same knowledge, interest.
And hopefully that answers your question. I got a little bit lost in what I was saying there, but it's good. So when I went to engineering school again, electrical engineering school simulation was I'm not sure we talked about it, certainly not in school. We talked about in many other places. We we didn't even imagine it. Right. It was still the drawing board and drawing with with with pencils and paper and rulers and all that. How important is simulation today when when you go to the classroom?
Is it is it like nobody even thinks about anymore? Taking a pencil in their hand and drawing something up? Everybody jumps right away to simulation. Are you guys making people aware There's still both sides and understanding every side is important to also use the tools. Talk a little bit about simulation and how that. Yeah, so that it's a very good question because I mean, I'm not that old. I'm only 40 quote unquote.
Back in the day when I was in college, we used to solve, you know, our dynamics problems by hand or free body diagram. You write your system of equations and you get your one answer and circle it right. And that isn't even that long ago. And that was pen, pencil and paper calculator. Yeah. Today. And in those classes we teach those same methods because it's very fundamental to the way of solving engineering problems. But then we do on the back end of that show.
Okay, well it's great to do it mechanically, methodically, on paper, but we don't do that in industry. We have all these software packages. So a folder in our curriculum is a lot of software and we're not trying to teach like specific software. We're trying to show that the software is a tool to solve engineering, much like the process of free body diagram, system of equations. Do your solution.
Write that the software is now part of that synthesis of the system, and you have to use that to solve your engineering problems because it enables many more opportunities to find the solution and to do it in a much more rapid way. Okay. And so we are right. We do use specific software packages, but again, we're not trying to teach that is the end all, be all software. It's just the methodology. So in academia, there's this big buzz buzz word of fourth industrial revolution, right?
And I'm sure you guys use it. And so academia is like, Oh, we need a full of all this stuff in industry. We've been doing this for years. And so coming back to the university, you can really show the students this is how we solve these problems using and leveraging the software to come up with better and improved engineer products, right? How to use them for problem solving, etc.. So yeah, it is a very big part.
And so you very rarely see students actually writing on paper using their little calculators, right? Like everything's like centered around how do we decompose this physical system, analyze it, use the software and computer systems to synthesize it. Right. And the biggest thing is when you and I were in school, we'd always circle, Here's the answer, right? Well, we know in industry there's never no chief engineer ever comes to you and says, Yeah, give me give me the one answer.
Yeah, that doesn't exist. And so the software in the process would really teach us. There's that just there's no one single answer. There's better engineering methodologies and better engineering solutions. Right? And it's not like we pit the students against each other who comes up with a better answer, but we just give them ambiguous problems that are tough to solve and let them come up with creative solutions bounded by the physics. Ranges and.
Hopefully that. No, that's good. Yeah. So when you take this DOE program, you alluded to it a little bit. It certainly helps do research. You mention it right, and that's what it's intended for. How beneficial is it really for the students to not only sit in the classroom and, let's say, do something more in the theoretical world, right? Yeah. Let's get to the ability to go get their hands dirty and see what they calculated.
Simulated proof in the virtual not I can put it on a car, drive it on a test track and actually feel how critical is that for students. Or to kind of bring the whole. Process to bring everything, bring again, sitting in a room, doing a calculation, but at the same time then taking it out, downloading some software or integrating a mechanical, whatever it might be. Yeah. Into a vehicle and I said, okay, not drives good. I know it doesn't do good. And that's what the simulation said.
But how critical is that, that practical experience out of this? Yeah, it's absolutely critical because there's some famous model guy who always said all models are wrong, some are just more useful than others. I'm forgetting. Yeah, yeah. But we carry that that mantra to the students and say, yeah, that's, you know, modeling F equals MA or a physical system. That's all great. And now try and go prove that it represents the real world.
Now you'll find the missing components or the stochastic things that all that'll throw that model off, and also to take and translate their results to a physical design or code, for instance, and try and get a vehicle to do some dynamic maneuver within acceptable customer limits of lateral longitudinal accelerations. They come to find out like this is a lot harder than I expected, right? I can't request square wave inputs. I it just leads to very impractical results or undesirable results.
So it's absolutely critical that they bring it back to a physical system and try and control it or try and show that my model does correlate with reality. And that's essentially what we're doing this week, is that our team from AVL has built a systems and systems environment. We've run hundreds of thousands of simulations of what's the energy savings. And now we pick a few of those scenarios and we take our 4 to 6 vehicle cohort.
We go out to the track and show that it matches up with reality as long as all the code is working. And in fact that's what we're trying to debug today. There's something just as imperfect and that last minute there, right. And that's all part of engineering is like, you know, you know, things don't work perfectly. The first time, as you know, is many computer scientist coders will tell you, oh, my code works perfect on or BS right? There's something in there that's worth fixing and tuning up.
Sure. Right. Yeah. So for you, what's the most exciting part about the project? From my from a for my research achievement, Not necessarily from the technology that we use or or from the ability to give to students. Again, that that glimpse into reality. Right. Or getting even more excited. What is it What is it that you feel like has come out of this that you guys are going to prove tomorrow? That really is exciting for you to see?
Yeah. Oh, that's a tough one because there's a lot of things that have already been done that connected vehicle connectivity. We're using cellular that's been done, automated vehicle, right? That's already been done showing in simulation that you know eco approach and departure from a traffic light where you have the signal phase and timing or spat. It's all been done right.
What I think's unique here and I think what the Department of Energy really glommed onto is that we're bringing all that together and we're answering this fundamental question What can the synergy of fuzing connectivity and automation in multiple vehicles that aren't just light duty vehicles or mixing heavy duty and light duty together? How can they work together as a team cooperatively to reduce energy on different infrastructures?
And it's a very right you got to tie many different things in together. And I think what the exciting part is, is we're able to leverage some of the toolsets that AVL has to link real time communication from the vehicle to a cloud compute platform that is essentially running a digital energy digital twin of the vehicles together.
That information that's coming real time from the vehicle goes in the energy model, then goes into a machine learning algorithm that's also running faster than real time to make decisions on forecasting what the group of vehicles or cohort of vehicle should do. It's been back to the vehicles and they react dynamically to that and it saves energy.
And we're on the like 2 to 400 millisecond time frame of communicating from the vehicle to the cloud to the AI, making decisions and then back to the vehicle in that. Right. And that's all enabled by a lot of really smart people leveraging tools and linking things together. And it's very cool. And we're doing that all through cellular. And what was really neat on the project is we have Michigan Tech way off in the middle of nowhere in the U.P..
We have Navistar in Indiana, Illinois, and we have ACM here in southeast Michigan. Were able to do a lot of debugging virtually because we set everything up on a cellular network and so we didn't have to have all the vehicles and infrastructure co-located to do our. Interesting our. Development. And that's very kind of kind of neat.
And it's, you know, it's just where the technology I think is going to be applied is, you know, this is we can become a very cool virtual development tool or virtual system in the loop for OEMs or suppliers to now help develop and validate connected vehicle technologies where you can set up different infrastructures, either enclose test track or even on, you know, Dynamometer systems.
And so I think there, you know, the technology for it to be public wide of all connected automated vehicles driving, you know, that's still ten, 15, 20 whatever years. But it's a glimpse that you guys are showing, right. Which right can be different, as you said, as existing pieces were, all maybe all a lot of them were done. But what you guys said, you brought it together. So the one plus one equals three, Right?
And now you can really use it as a development tool at the vehicle level or powertrain level, whether you do an enclosed test track or on a day. No, I think that's where we can really show that, you know, what we've done with this systems and systems bench through cellular. I think it can be a for a lot of development cost reduction. Yeah. Because when I was at GM, say, 2007, that's when I started. We always talked about removing development vehicles from the process because they're expensive.
Okay, well, how are you going to do that? Well, we're going to do everything in math. Well, it's great, but at some point, you know, and that's where I come in to using your guys's system on the dyno where we try to use we do some stuff in math and then we do some stuff on the dyno there, the lab, and then ultimately flash it in the car and try it on the road.
And I think what we're doing in this project can really help the math in the lab portion of it before we go try and take it to the to the vehicles, because test track time development vehicles are ungodly expensive. And time consuming as. Well. Right? Because they they fight you. Yeah. Yeah. So good. Brian, That is elegant to have an answer to that question. Oh, it's good.
It's again, it shows again the need to me sometimes it's interesting when when people say you kind of said it right, it's like, wow, we didn't really develop anything new, but and then the real cool stuff starts. You took all different pieces and brought them together, which suddenly that makes this beautiful system of systems. Yep, we can really do say yeah. We added several different things that are existing, but with that it was not one plus one equals two.
Again, as I like to say, really three, four or five, it just it grew. It mushroomed very quickly. Yep. That's cool. Very good. I thank for your time. Yeah. Thanks for coming in, everyone. Thanks for listening. To Reimagine Mobility podcast. If you like episode, please subscribe and tell a friend.