Researchers from WMG at the University of Warwick have won gold at National Instruments Engineering Impact Awards 2018 for the WMG 3xD Simulator project. WMG’s 3xD Simulator is a world’s first-of-its-kind facility that enables autonomous vehicles to drive around in a virtual environment– accelerating testing before they are road ready.

Chief Engineer Gunny Dhadyalla, accompanied by colleague Dr Jakobus Groenewald, accepted the award for the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles category at the National Instruments Awards 2018 for the WMG 3xD Simulator Project on the 6 November 2018. This was topped off by more success as WMG then picked up the award for the overall Engineering Impact Awards winners.

The WMG 3xD Simulator Project was one of two finalists for an award in the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles category. As winners of this category they faced stiff competition to beat the winners of other categories, who represented innovations from across Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, to win the overall Engineering Impact award.

We are pleased to announce that our Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Strategy, Jan Godsell, has been recognised as the first ever winner of the Real Impact Awards ‘Individual’ category.

Professor Godsell, who was nominated for the award by our Chairman Professor Lord Bhattacharyya, impressed the judges with the way that she puts practitioners, policy makers and the public at the heart of her scholarship, and her innovative approach to building impact through storytelling, poems, physical artwork and the media.

The Real Impact Awards celebrate the commitment to impact by the research community across the globe, honour the change-makers, and bring together key stakeholders in the impact debate.

The awards aim to raise the profile of individuals, teams and institutions that have placed real impact at the top of their agenda; recognise innovative approaches to impact; celebrate interdisciplinary research; bridge the gap between research and practice; and tell real impact success stories and showcase those driving the debate.

WMG, at the University of Warwick, is leading a new £11 million programme to evaluate connected and autonomous vehicles which will work with a range of partners including Highways England. It further establishes Coventry, Warwickshire and the West Midlands as the heart of connected and autonomous vehicles research and development in the UK.

The £11 million Meridian 3 programme is funded by Innovate UK and brings together Highways England with Midlands Future Mobility, which is led by WMG at the University of Warwick.

This addition to the Midlands Future Mobility project will enable connected and autonomous vehicle technologies, that have been developed using simulation and test tracks, to then be evaluated on roads in real-world driving situations, providing invaluable additional learning that will enable them to become a commercially viable and desirable means of road-transport.

The first cohort for our new Project Professionals Programme joined us this week at WMG. Accredited by the Association of Project Management, the two week course provides the key tools and frameworks needed for successful Project, Programme and Portfolio management.

Participants are fully prepared for their APM Project Professional Qualification exam, and upon successfully completing the course will also gain a Postgraduate Award in P3M that recognises their professional capabilities.

Jayne Redfern, Associate Professor and course leader said:

The course is the first of its kind to be offered by any University, and is being supported by the Association for Project Management who recognise our expertise in this area.”

You can find out more about the programme here

A new multi-million-pound ‘Smart City Mobility Centre', to be established in Warwickshire and the West Midlands was announced last night (Monday 12^th November 2018) at the Coventry and Warwickshire Automotive Dinner in Warwickshire’s Coombe Abbey Hotel.

WMG Chairman Professor Lord Bhattacharyya announced that Europe’s first multi-million-pound Smart City Mobility Centre will be based at the University of Warwick’s Wellesbourne campus, with driverless capable vehicle testing on the University of Warwick’s campus in Coventry and Warwickshire.

The Centre brings together WMG’s research expertise and Jaguar Land Rover’s leading research and engineering capabilities.

On Friday 10 November, Diane Burton and Margaret Low ran a CAD and 3D printing workshop for teenagers attending the Action Duchenne International Conference at the NEC Metropole Hotel in Birmingham.

The workshop gave teenagers attending the conference the opportunity to learn more about the potential of 3D printing to design simple gadgets to help them with every day tasks.

They learnt about 3D printing and had a chance to try Autodesk Fusion 360 CAD software. With the help of Warwick Engineering undergraduates, Harry and Jack Adams, Alice Davis and Hannah May, the youngsters used the Fusion 360 tutorials (on our outreach webpages) to learn how to design straw bungs for various drinks containers. A number of them also completed their designs during the workshop.

This workshop built on work done during the WMG project “Engaging Young People with Assistive Technology.

All the youngsters who attended received a selection of 3D printed straw bungs to take home along with details of the WMG Fusion 360 tutorials  

WMG at the University of Warwick have just begun work with a consortium of 11 organisations led by Latent Logic in Oxford on a £2.7 million UK government funded project to create a highly accurate virtual reality simulator environment, including artificial intelligence (AI) trained models of pedestrians and road users, to test connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs).

OmniCAV, which was awarded funding as part of a competition run by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and Innovate UK, will be fed by highly detailed scans of real roads, traffic camera data, accident data and near-miss analyses. These inputs will be used to create a high-fidelity model of real-world roads, which will be populated with realistic artificial intelligence (AI) based road users. This model will used to create an extensive open-access library of VR simulator scenarios to test connected and autonomous vehicles.

OmniCAV will lay the foundations for the development of a comprehensive, robust and secure simulator, aimed at providing a certification tool for CAVs that can be used by regulatory and accreditation bodies, insurers and manufacturers to accelerate the safe development of CAVs.”

A record number of almost 1450 students have enrolled at WMG this academic year.

A huge 1,241 people from 63 countries, are now studying full-time, with a further 27 studying part-time, on one of our 15 Management, Business or sector specific Master’s courses.

96 students have enrolled on our part-time Applied Engineering Programme, studying for a BEng degree alongside their full-time job in the engineering or technology industry. Another 11 have enrolled on our Postgraduate Engineering Degree Apprenticeship Programme.

We have welcomed our largest single intake of Research Degree students across various programmes, including seven EngDs, 24 PhDs and six MSc by Research and the first intake onto our new MSc by Research in Business Transformation.

We’ve also welcomed our first cohort of 23 full-time BSc Cyber Security students.

You can find out more about all of our education programmes here.

A new method of testing alloys - Rapid Alloy Prototyping, is 100 times faster than current methods, allowing new products to reach the market more quickly, thanks to £7 million of funding announced today for a new “virtual factory” designed by the Prosperity Partnership, including WMG at the University of Warwick.

This Prosperity Partnership – led by Swansea University and involving WMG at the University of Warwick, will implement a Rapid Alloy Prototyping (RAP) process, thanks to £7 million of funding announced today from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

Rapid Alloy Prototyping effectively means that much of the testing can be carried out in research labs and imaging suites - a virtual factory – rather than in an actual steel plant.