ECE team takes a top award in Valeo Innovation Challenge

Monday, November 3, 2014

Three Waterloo Engineering students have returned from France with a prize of 10,000 euros in their back pockets, thanks to an invention that helps vehicles communicate with each other to enhance passenger safety.

The team called Three VeMAColleagues, comprised of electrical and computer engineering doctoral candidatesSailesh Bharati, Ning Lu and 

Winning team
recent PhD graduate Hassan Aboubakr Omar, won second place in the 2014 Valeo Innovation Challenge Competition. The international student contest was entered by 969 students teams from 455 universities in 55 countries. Participants were challenged to design and build a product or system to make the cars of 2030 smarter and more intuitive.

VeMAC, the Waterloo Engineering team's vehicle-to-vehicle networking program, can produce safer cars using wireless communication among vehicles nearby each other or roadside units.

After submitting the team's idea, the members were selected among the top 20 teams out of 969 from 450 universities and 55 different countries. 

After months of creating and testing the program, writing reports and preparing a mock-up presentation, the Waterloo Engineering team was selected as one of the seven finalists. Members of the seven short-listed teams travelled to Paris in October to present their projects to the contest jury, consisting of scientists, astronauts, economists, and Valeo board members.

Real world implementation

Before the challenge, the students who are all members of electrical and computer engineering's Broadband Communications Research Group had only tested VeMAC using computer simulators and mathematical analysis. The Valeo Innovation Challenge provided the opportunity to try it out using real experiments. 

"The challenge allowed us to bring our ideas from the technical papers to the real world implementation. We were very glad to feel that a big industrial organization like Valeo is interested in and supporting our innovation," says Omar, now a postdoctoral researcher.

The students are supervised by electrical and computer engineering professors Weihua Zhaung and Sherman Shen who provided support throughout the competition.