COVER STORY | FUTURE MOBILITY
Also making the jump to New
Horizons Studio is Dr. Ernestine Fu,
who joins the group as Director of
Product Management. She has led
research on human operator and
autonomous vehicle interactions at
Stanford University’s Volkswagen
Automotive Innovation Lab, as well
as scaled emerging technology
companies for over nine years as
a venture capital partner at Alsop
Louie Partners.
DRIVING AND WALKING
A unique mobility solution–
something that drives and
walks–presents immensely
difficult design and engineering
challenges. One of the most
common amongst these is a neverending
quest in the transportation
industry: create components that
are lighter, but stronger, than past
generations of similar components.
Designers and engineers tasked
with these ‘lightweighting’
challenges frequently look to
futuristic materials such as metallic
foams, carbon fibre and new metal
alloys, along with modern design
techniques such as generative
design, for solutions. This is why
Hyundai turned to Autodesk to
collaborate.
Generative design seeks to
streamline and accelerate the
process of developing design
ideas and getting to production.
In the time a designer can create
one idea, a computer can generate
thousands, within the constraints
provided by the designer,
and present those numerous
design options with the tradeoffs
of strength, weight, cost,
manufacturing complexity and
sustainability clearly illustrated
early in the process. Autodesk’s
tools provide options through which
designers and engineers may tap
the near-limitless compute power of
the cloud to reduce their mundane,
repetitive analysis work, freeing up
their time to focus on creativity and
innovation.
“Generative design helps the
human mind expand the range of
possibilities,” says Dr Suh. “With
the help of generative design,
a single designer or engineer
can go through perhaps dozens
or hundreds of different design
iterations, so it enables them to
see things that they may not have
otherwise considered, and in
tandem tackle complex problems.
Which is to say that people still
have a very important role to play in
shaping the design direction. There
will always be need for the human
eye, the heart, and the soul as vital
parts of the design process.”
The Elevate concept is based
on a modular EV platform with the
capability to switch out different
bodies for specific situations. The
robotic leg architecture has five
degrees of freedom plus wheel hub
propulsion motors and is enabled
by the latest in electric actuator
technology.
Further, the combination of
wheeled motion with articulating
legs provides a new paradigm of
mobility by enabling faster walking
speeds, unique dynamic driving
postures and torsional control at the
end of each leg.
“By combining the power of
robotics with Hyundai’s latest EV
technology, Elevate has the ability
to take people where no car has
been before, and redefine our
perception of vehicular freedom,”
said David Byron, design manager,
Sundberg-Ferar. “Imagine a car
stranded in a snow ditch just 10
feet off the highway being able to
walk or climb over the treacherous
terrain, back to the road potentially
saving its injured passengers –
12 WWW.EUREKAMAGAZINE.CO.UK | DECEMBER 2020
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