UC Davis Engineers Join CivicProgress Challenge to Advance Inclusive Mobility
The University of California, Davis, is one of 12 campuses to join the first CivicProgress Challenge, a two-year, virtual competition tasking students with developing inclusive mobility solutions for wheelchair users and people living with disabilities.
The challenge was created by the Society of Automotive Engineers in partnership with General Motors Co., or GM. GM has supplied each student team with a Cruise Origin, a discontinued autonomous vehicle.
The vehicle arrives out of commission and stripped of its autonomous driving capabilities, providing a blank canvas for students' accessibility solutions.
The first year of the challenge focuses on adding accessible features to the car, such as a ramp and wheelchair docking system. In year two, the team will shift their focus to app development, creating ways to improve or simplify the riding experience for people with disabilities. At the end of each year, the teams will present their progress in virtual competitions.
A requirement for the project is to work with wheelchair users and individuals with disabilities. This is to ensure the mobility solutions meet the needs of the communities the student teams aim to serve. To this end, the UC Davis team is collaborating with the university's Student Disability Center.
“Our goal is to be working with people with lived experience throughout the process,” said Dahlia Garas, research program director for the Electric Vehicle Research Center and co-advisor for the UC Davis CivicProgress team.
There are 18 students currently participating in the CivicProgress Challenge. They are working with Garas and Chris Nitta, a professor of teaching in computer science and co-advisor on the challenge, to build a mock-up of the vehicle’s interior for testing. The team will then break into subgroups to focus on specific aspects of the project, such as the ramp or accessible seat belts.
Garas sees the challenge as similar to an extended senior design project open to all undergraduates. Students can design, manufacture and test components and gain hands-on experience with the engineering process by iterating solutions.
“When they go out to a job interview, they [will] have a really good example of how they applied engineering beyond what they would do in a class or a lab,” she said.
Nitta hopes the challenge will also be a way to inspire students to think more deeply about engineering.
“Whenever they design something, they may be thinking, ‘Well, is this going to work for everyone?’”
