On 3-4 May, the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) held its annual External Advisory Board (EAB) meeting and review. This event is centered around the ASDL Grand Challenge program, which serves as an important means of teaching and training first year Masters students. In the Grand Challenges, incoming graduate students are divided into teams and each team is given a broad, open-ended problem to address. Students are involved in both a vehicle and a system of systems (SoS) project.

The projects are conducted over the course of two academic semesters, concluding with a final presentation to sponsors and other stakeholders during EAB. The event featured 41 Grand Challenges — 21 vehicle focused and 20 SoS focused.

The scope of Grand Challenge topics is current and relevant to the aerospace industry, and the topics are often inspired by sponsored research projects. ASDL Director Professor Dimitri Mavris explains, “From these Grand Challenges, students learn many needed skills that are not typically taught in a classroom, such as good research practices, how to address a new problem are with which one may be unfamiliar, how to manage time on a large-scale research project, how to effectively communicate results, and many others.”

The event included a poster session/reception where students presented the project poster to the project sponsors and other attendees. There was also a feedback session during which the attendees provide constructive comments to the students about their work as well as advice on how use the critical system thinking skills they learned through the course of the projects.

This year ASDL inaugurated the Daniel P. Schrage Award for Excellence. Named for Professor Emeritus and ASDL founder, the award honors Dr. Schrage’s contributions to Georgia Tech and ASDL and his continuing legacy. The award will be presented to the best Grand Challenge teams each year ― one for each category. The teams are evaluated on various criteria including progress towards project’s technical objectives, cohesion of the team, and how prepared the team was for project reviews.

This year the award was presented to the following teams.
 

SoS Grand Challenge Award

For best SoS Grand Challenge, the award was presented to the Electrical VEhicle Recharging and Mobility Optimization via Visualization Environment (EVERMOVE) team.

 

Vehicle Grand Challenge Award

For the best Vehicle Grand Challenge, there was a tie between the following teams.

FOQA & ASAP Safety Trending (FAST)

Georgia Tech Fast Optimization Utility for Raceday (GT-FOUR)