High Level Management
Team Manager
The team manager plays an extremely important role in motivating the team and ensuring the success. The team manager is responsible for motivating all the team members and assessing their performance and ensuring that every team member can grow during the year both personally and professionally.
As team manager, you are also responsible that the equilibrium between time, money and quality is kept. Daily, you try to improve the performance of the team in a creative way and you try to find the pitfalls to be ahead of the game.
LEADERSHIP
PUBLIC SPEAKING
MANAGEMENT
PROJECT PLANNING
MANAGEMENT
Project Manager
Your main responsibility as project manager is the planning. From the time perspective of the project you will keep an overview of the general planning for designing and building the car. You will support the technical chiefs in their department-specific planning and make sure they stick to it. In addition you should keep an eye out for interdepartmental interfaces so they align with everyone's planning.
It is your responsibility that the car is built on time so that there will be enough testing time to make sure that the car is in winning condition at the competitions!
Chief Engineer
As Chief Engineer you oversee the engineering of the car; from development, through the build phase all the way to operation on the competition track.
As you are a manager of managers, you will use your communication skills to understand the key trade offs and design choices in the technical departments and support decision making. That includes facilitating efficient flow of information to maximize overall vehicle performance in the bounds of the schedule. You are the representative of vehicle performance, so effective communication with the Project Manager is crucial to combine your efforts and support departments by looking ahead to upcoming challenges and organizing them together before they become problems!
LEADERSHIP
ENGINEERING
MANAGEMENT
Finance Manager
ORGANISATION
COMMUNICATION
MANAGEMENT
As Finance Manager you are responsible for one critical element of the car, the budget. As Finance Manager, you will start by making a budget for the entire project. You talk to chiefs, companies and old team members to know exactly what every item will cost.
Secondly, you are responsible to acquire partnerships so that we are able to build the car. Combined with the Operations Manager, you set out to recruit new sponsors. Combining this with making all purchasing decisions for the team, you play a crucial role in making the best car possible!
Operations Manager
As Operations Manager you are responsible for 3 of the most important parts of the teams organisation.
As Operations manager you organize all events we host during a year. This starts with small teamwide events, allowing the team to bond. This builds to two big events where we present our design and car to the outside world. Futhermore, you will organize the most exciting events of the year, by getting the entire team to the international competitions!
Additionally, you are responsible for the external communication, by managing our relations with sponsors and our presence on social media.
Lastly, you will be responsible for maintaining and improving our workshop and office, allowing the team to function optimally.
ORGANISATION
COMMUNICATION
MANAGEMENT
Departments
Chassis
As the chief of the chassis department, your key focus is to ensure the structural integrity and safety of the car, while assuring that all subsystems of the car can come together in the high-tech wonder that is the Formula Student race car. This entails composite structural design of the main, load-bearing parts, proving their safety compliance through calculations and testing. Light-weight, strength and producibility is the name of the game! Leading the chassis department is a unique position, as it is one of the only departments where you are in charge of the full design-production-testing cycle.
Aerodynamics
Leading the aerodynamics department you will be responsible for overviewing structural and aerodynamic design and development of the downforce generating elements on the car. At the same time, you will lead the production of all the predominantly composite parts whilst ensuring quality control. Aerodynamics is one of the prime performance drivers on the car and be sure you can also have the most fun by experimenting with some funky elements such as active downforce!
Drivetrain and Suspension
Leading the Drivetrain and Suspension department is the most mechanically oriented position in the management team. You will be responsible for everything between the tyre and the chassis, including the pedalbox and the steering. You will lead a team of engineers in the design process of these systems. You will develop good mechanical engineering practices, CAD and FEA skills, management experience and so much more. You will learn to design mechanical components on their limits and you will ensure a lightweight design of every single component in your department. Clear communication with other chiefs, especially chief Vehicle Dynamics, is key for a successful design.
Powertrain
The Powertrain of a DUT car consists of the Accumulator, Motor Controllers, Motors and Cooling. These components are at the heart of the car and can make or break your performance. As Chief Powertrain you will be responsible for these components and your department. Your work will be both mechanical and electrical, and you will get a lot of experience in power electronics. You and your department are very important for the reliability of the car and you will have a large role in the testing process of both the Powertrain and the car itself.
Electronics
Electric race cars such as ours are full of electrical systems. The powertrain contains the most obvious ones such as the motors or the accumulator, but that is just the tip of the iceberg! As chief electronics you are responsible for the department that takes care of all low voltage systems. This ranges from battery management system to the driverless LiDAR scanner, and from the vehicle control unit to the dashboard. Your department works on the hardware that is used by autonomous-, embedded- and control systems. You are responsible for our self-developed PCBs, all sensors, electrical safety and system integration testing. Your biggest interfaces include embedded software and powertrain. Experience in PCB design is beneficial.
Embedded Software and Infrastructure
The DUT race cars feature many different embedded electronics, so called Electronic Control Units (ECUs). As Chief Embedded Software, your goal will be to ensure the car is safe and fast by designing and engineering the software on these devices. Primarily, you work together with the Chief Electronics to implement sensors and actuators that interface the motor controllers, high and low voltage batteries, driver dashboard, telemetry systems, and steering actuator (for the Driverless Vehicle). The embedded systems also run a high-frequency control loop which keeps the car speedy, and for which the race engineer and drivers may change parameters, so communication with the Chief VD/Controls is also frequent.
Does implementing high-performance software for embedded platforms not scare you? Do you eat C++ for breakfast? Then perhaps Chief Embedded Software is something for you!
Autonomous Software
As chief autonomous software, you are responsible for the autonomous software pipeline and making the car drive by itself. Doing this, you will have to replace the brain of the driver. The autonomous software "pipeline" consists of perception, state estimation, mapping and path planning. You will have to communicate with your department's engineers to understand the workings, trade-offs and issues of the complete pipeline. After all, it is your responsibility to ensure the performance and robustness of each component, as a single failure in one can cascade to many failures in the others. Knowledge of deep learning, Kalman filters, graph theory and optimisations are a plus.
Note, that this department could be separated into multiple components, if applicants are found!
Vehicle Dynamics and Controls
The Chief VD is responsible for the performance of the car. You will optimize the car to be as quick as possible on the competition to gain as many points as possible. You will do this by setting design targets to aid important design decisions, and manage a team of engineers who work on different models, for the suspension design, balance of the car, and aerodynamic design targets. Since other departments in the team are dependent on your work, you will have to be a step ahead of all departments during the design phase.
You will also be responsible for both the high-level and low-level controls of the car. For high-level controls, this means you will oversee the development of optimal control algorithms like MPC and LQR, that will track a reference trajectory to make the car drive autonomously. The low-level controls translate the output of the high-level controls or the driver to torque commands to each of the four wheels, using torque vectoring to turn the car even faster in corners!