Waterford Institute of Technology: Office of Research and Innovation

Background

The Automotive Control Group (formerly known as the Centre for Automotive Research) was established in 2000 at Waterford Institute of Technology to carry out research, consultancy and training in software and electronic systems applicable to automotive applications. The group brings together a broad range of complementary skills from the automotive, computing and electronic areas.

The Automotive Control Group carries out research at Masters postgraduate level, with the current emphasis on the following topics:

Distributed automotive control systems
Vehicle networks
Automotive software development

This research is geared towards results with direct industrial application (applied research). Our primary aim is to provide our researchers with the real world skills that will enable them to secure employment as research and development engineers in the automotive industry. The main method for achieving this aim is to research relevant topics for current and future automotive applications. Many research ideas originate from our partners in the automotive industry and each researcher is linked up with an industry collaborator who acts as an external mentor for the research. Our industrial collaborators include TRW, ETAS, Denso, and Ford.

A number of undergraduate projects are also sponsored each year with the aim of supporting our primary
research and discovering new areas of investigation.

The Automotive Control Group educates undergraduates in automotive software and systems design through the Embedded Systems stream of the B.Sc. in Applied Computing degree course. Students graduating from this course have fundamental practical and theoretical knowledge of automotive networks (CAN, LIN and FlexRay), OSEK/AUTOSAR programming and automotive development processes. Graduating students are ideally qualified for graduate positions as developers in the automotive industry. Alumni of the group have gone to to work with leading automotive companies such as Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, Denso, Zytek, Sumitomo, Snap-On, Pi Technologies, ATSR and SAIC, China.