THE TEAM

Team Leaders

The Team Leaders are responsible for managing the organization and its projects. They work closely with the heads of each department to ensure that development projects are feasible and aligned with the organization’s goals. Their role includes monitoring progress to ensure that milestones are met and objectives are achieved. Additionally, the Team Leaders oversee budget management, ensuring that financial resources are allocated effectively and used wisely throughout each project. This collaborative effort helps create an environment where innovative ideas can flourish and projects can advance successfully.

Management

Management is a cross-sectional department that includes bureaucracy and marketing. First of all, the bureaucracy focuses on organizing the companies collaborating with the project, the relationship with the university and the team’s treasury.

Secondly, we bring social media and the team’s website to the forefront of getting to know us around the world and attracting new insights into our project. Therefore, it is essential in the audiovisual quality in which we work every day. We also organize events we attend, as well as create our own, such as car presentations.

Aerodynamics & Cooling

Our main function is the design and manufacture of the aerodynamic package of the car. We use programs such as SolidWorks to create components such as Front Wing, Rear Wing, Underbody… We perform CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations with Star-CCM + or OpenFoam, to study the design that will be incorporated into the car. Once the aerodynamic appendices have been defined, we move on to the manufacturing stage where we use composite materials such as carbon fiber to obtain rigid and lightweight parts. Throughout this cycle we seek to increase the downforce for a faster cornering step and reduce the resistance to advance.

Chassis & Composites

The main function is the design and manufacture of the structural part of the car. They are also responsible for the ergonomics of the vehicle (steering wheel, driving position, seat), the car’s tires and all the safety components that protect the driver, such as the Impact Attenuator and the Firewall. We work with composite materials such as carbon fiber, a very popular material in the motor world due to its good properties such as high tensile strength and high rigidity, and due to the low weight parts that can be obtained. Each component is also designed and analyzed using Solidworks, Hypermesh and testing.

Vehicle Dynamics

The study of tire, steering and suspension behavior is key to better vehicle performance. Another important function is the design of the planetary transmission that fits into the wheel assembly. They are also responsible for the design and improvement of the pedal board and the braking system, very important elements to achieve a better response of the car and, consequently, to improve safety. They are also in charge of the mechanical braking and autonomous steering system and its actuators.

Electronics

The electronics department is responsible for the design, programming and implementation of the various ECUs (electronic control units), which receive information about the car’s status and its environment, and act accordingly. It is also responsible for the design of its own low-voltage wiring, telemetry implementation, driver control interface, and other tasks.

Powertrain

In charge of the car’s heart, the High Voltage circuit: both the self-made high and low voltage batteries which deliver power to the inverters, transforming the DC current into triphasic AC that reaches the four outboard wheel motors. In addition, the Powertrain section is also tasked with the cooling and structural design of its components, both designing the engines’ cooling jackets and the batteries’ containers.
Last but definitely not least, the section is facing one of its toughests challenges to this date, the design and validation of its in-house inverter, both developing the power electronics and the control algorithm in FPGA.

Vehicle Controls

In this department, autonomous and manual control architectures come together. In vehicle control we are in charge of the path planning, state estimation and autonomous controller algorithms, as well as the lower-level layers such as torque vectoring, traction control and power control. Our main goal is bridging the gap between planning and control unlocking better performances of the behaviour of the car on track.

Perception

Responsible for processing all the signals captured by the most advanced sensors on the market (LiDAR + IMU + Cameras) to detect the position and color of each of the cones of the circuit and find the limits of the track. The goal is to make the most of the 600,000 points per second returned by the LiDAR and all the other data to see the track limits as quickly as possible.