Centre for Connected & Autonomous Automotive Research (CCAAR) Alumni

Pawel Jaworski

In 2014 Pawel completed his PhD in advanced traffic control methods for mixed CAV environments and joined HORIBA MIRA. Since then Pawel has participated in multiple research and engineering projects. His research interests lie in new methods for development and testing of efficient CAV, distributed cooperative vehicular situation awareness and cooperative decision making.

In 2018 Pawel assumed leadership of the newly formed Horizon Scanning CAV research team, which has been involved in a wide array of research projects, ranging from exploring application of brain-computer interfaces in human-CAV interaction to the DigiCAV project aiming to create a modular and saleable simulation platform for accelerated CAV development and evaluation. He is responsible for planning and leading CAV research activities, as well as designing and developing software and simulation platforms to support research in multiple areas.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Madeline Cheah

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Milena Kukova

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alexis Wilson

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dan Fowler

Dan obtained his first degree from Coventry University and had a successful career as a software engineer developing a wide range of high value industrial and financial projects, from programming microprocessors in control equipment to managing teams designing and producing software for financial services. He is a Chartered Engineer with an interest in the social impact of technology and the trustworthiness of the computer systems that we use to run our world.  Looking for a new challenge he returned to Coventry University to obtain a Masters in Forensic Computing and pursue research in the new field of automotive cybersecurity.

The rapid increase in computational power, digital networks and connectivity in road vehicles and city infrastructure (Smart Cities) coupled with new connected sensor technologies (Internet of Things) is providing new opportunities to engineer systems that solve existing and emerging socioeconomic issues. He believes that it is important to ensure that new technology is safe and secure to use in an accessible and natural manner. Connected cars and autonomous vehicles are high impact technologies and there are theoretical and proven cyber threats to such systems. His doctoral research contributed a cybersecurity testing technique for vehicle systems to help combat future threats.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joscha Wasser

Following a degree in transport design at Coventry University, Joscha completed his PhD at HORIBA MIRA and the National Transport Design Centre.

His research focused on the passenger experience and comfort in driverless first and last mile mobility vehicles.  The research was based around the MiCar concept, a driverless first and last mobility vehicle which was designed specifically for the MIRA Technology Park. The concept was initially used as a visualisation tool to synthesise the findings from a passenger comfort model for this type of vehicle. The concept was then evaluated using a traditional ergonomic buck, focusing on accessibility and usability. As such an ergonomic buck gives little insight to the full design of the vehicle, a mixed reality simulator was developed which provides trial participants with a fully immersive journey experience in the MiCar concept. Ultimately this work provides a guideline for the development of a user centred design of a driverless first and last mile mobility vehicle.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Maciej Cieslak

Maciej Cieslak was a PhD research student in the field of vehicle ride comfort. He conducted his research in a collaborative programme co-funded by Coventry University and HORIBA MIRA Ltd., based in Nuneaton, UK.

Before joining Coventry University for doctoral studies, Maciej obtained his Bachelor of Engineering degree from Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST) in Poland. After completing his undergraduate studies, he went on to finish a Master of Science in Automotive Engineering at the same university. During his studies at WUST, he was also involved in Formula Student and Smart Moto Challenge competitions as vehicle dynamics and numerical simulation specialist. His studies were completed with an industry partner and led to a formulation of a new hydraulic arm design for electronically controlled small demolition machines. The findings were captured in a dissertation titled: “Development of the new arm system solution for small mobile demolition vehicle through design thinking and numerical methods”.

In his research at Coventry University, he completed a PhD titled: “Perception of Vehicle Ride Quality”. He focused on novel methodologies for objective and subjective vehicle ride comfort data correlation as well as the influence of vibration on human physiology. The research led to the formulation of a predictive model for ride comfort data correlation based on artificial neural networks. Secondly, an innovative methodology of subjective vehicle ride comfort assessment and evaluation using biometric data was tested and proved to be accurate.

Maciej’s further research interests include the impact of vibration on human ride perception, motion sickness and active/adaptive suspensions systems for autonomous vehicles.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

James Spooner

James Spooner was a PhD student in the field of autonomous vehicle research. He is conducting a collaborative research project between Coventry University and HORIBA MIRA. He was a member of the Institute for Future Transport and Cities at Coventry University and the Centre for Connected Autonomous Automotive Research at HORIBA MIRA.

Before joining Coventry University for his PhD, James completed his Bachelors degree at Coventry University in Automotive Engineering in May 2017, graduating first class with honours. He then went on to work for the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) as a researcher for 7 months, working on innovative projects such as the London Bus Safety Standard, and a Highways England fatal accident study. James decided to return to Coventry University in January 2018 to pursue a PhD.

James’ PhD research focussed on generating realistic and rare pedestrian scenarios for the testing of autonomous vehicles. To do this, he curated his own dataset detailing the movements and behaviours of pedestrians in any given scene; the dataset consists of videos taken from dashcam footage.
He then used novel machine learning methods to generate new scenarios from the knowledge learnt from the real scenarios. This gave engineers better testing coverage when testing their autonomous systems.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Felix Batsch

Felix was a PhD student in the field of autonomous vehicle research. He conducted his doctoral studies in a collaborative research project between Coventry University and HORIBA MIRA. He was a member of the Institute for Future Transport and Cities at Coventry University and the Centre for Connected Autonomous Automotive Research at HORIBA MIRA.

After receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, he went on to pursue a consecutive Master of Science in Automotive Engineering from KIT. Additionally, he holds a Master of Engineering degree from Tongji University in Shanghai, China, where he spent two years. He concluded his studies with a research project at Bosch (China) Investment Ltd., leading to the dissertation “Modelling and Degree of Hybridization Optimization of a Fuel Cell-Battery Hybrid Scooter”.

His research focused on developing a new methodology to test autonomous vehicles using comprehensive vehicle simulation in conjunction with supervised machine learning. Felix developed a framework, which identifies safety critical corner case scenarios. Corner case scenarios reveal flaws in the design and behaviour of novel autonomous vehicles.

He has further interest in the area of model predictive control for behaviour generation and path planning of autonomous vehicles.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Samson Palmer

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Richard Stocker

Richard was a PhD student as part of a collaboration between HORIBA MIRA and Coventry University in the field of battery cell degradation. He is also an employee at HORIBA MIRA in the position of Energy Systems Innovation Lead within the Horizon Scanning team.

After completing a MEng degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nottingham, he joined HORIBA MIRA on their graduate scheme program. In this, he was rotated around several departments before taking a permanent position in the Software and Controls team, specialising in testing, modelling and control system development of automotive battery cells. Recently he moved to his current position in the Horizon Scanning department where he now focuses on research projects and strategic roadmap development for energy systems development, leading the energy systems team in areas including batteries, fuel cells and flow cells.

His research focuses on a key challenge of Li-ion cells which is durability. The project encompasses testing, analysing and modelling the degradation behaviours within Li-Ion cells to express their performance changes with lifetime, and the sensitivity of these changes to the way in which the battery cells are used.