SAE Congress 2009

I attended the SAE Congress in Detroit with National Instruments last week and it surprised me how many members from academia were present. My initial impression was that this conference would be mostly industrial but I met quite a few professors and students on the floor.

The main theme of the conference was focusing on R&D to make cars more environmentally friendly. Some of those topics included fuel cells, infract structure for electric cars, ethanol fuel, and hybrid cars. At the opening ceremony, both the Governor of Michigan and the Governor of California (yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger) gave greats talks about “going green” and what is currently being done in Michigan to get out of this current economic turmoil. According to the Governor of Michigan, the state of Michigan does more R&D for the automotive industry then all the states, Mexico, and Canada combined!

At the National Instruments booth, we were running the Quanser Active Suspension system using the Compact RIO and LabVIEW software. This demonstrated active suspension technology as well as the power of LabVIEW and cRIO hardware.

Javier Gutierrez from NI posted a video of the device in action