Michigan Engineering News

Understanding how and when drivers change lanes is key to improving highway traffic flow, safety and autonomous vehicle performance, and a new approach developed at the University of Michigan outperforms current methods using only GPS data.Up to this point, lange change estimation has been done using on-board cameras or lane-level high-resolution maps that provide geometry, lane markings and lane connections. Both methods are expensive and not always reliable. Cameras fail when the lane lines are faded or occluded and maps are difficult to update at a large scale.

A monitoring system for ultrasonic welding, developed by University of Michigan and General Motors researchers for production of the Chevy Volt electric vehicle (EV), identified nearly all bad welds, avoiding an estimated $22 million in potential repairs.Designed and implemented roughly 15 years ago, the technology was recently recognized with the S.M. Wu Research Implementation Award from SME, formerly known as the Society and Manufacturing Engineers. It’s an award for “outstanding original research presented as a paper at the annual North American Manufacturing Research and, subsequently, upon implementation, had a significant commercial and/or societal impact.”The inline monitoring system—integrated directly into the production line—had a success rate of 99.99995%, missing two defective welds out of more than 4 million total welds. The technology helped improve the quality of EVs, lower their cost and improve production efficiency.

The risk of satellite collisions is growing as space gets more crowded, with more than 12,000 active satellites orbiting Earth, as well as debris like spent rocket casings, dead satellites and broken bits of equipment.The number of active satellites is expected to grow in the coming years as launches become more affordable. Starlink alone aims to launch a constellation of more than 40,000 satellites into orbit, not to mention the large constellations that will underpin broadband internet projects from both Amazon and China. NASA received approximately 20,000 collision warnings every month in the first half of 2025, a four-fold increase since 2020.

Drawing on the prehistoric art of basketweaving, engineers at the University of Michigan found that woven materials return to their original shape after repeated cycles of strong compression, while continuous sheets of the same material permanently deform. The modular platform to assemble woven corners presented in Physical Review Research could be used in any application where both resilience and stiffness are essential including soft robotics, car parts and architectural components.After lead author Guowei Wayne Tu, a doctoral student of civil and environmental engineering at U-M, came across an article that dated woven baskets to around 7500 BCE, the researchers wondered if the ancient craft persists today for reasons beyond geometry and aesthetics.

The United States could ramp up its production of Arctic-faring ships with the help of a new consortium of universities and national labs from the U.S., Canada and Finland. Engineers from the University of Michigan are members of the consortium, called ICE-SHIELD, along with engineers from the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Carderock Division, Memorial University in Canada, the National Research Council of Canada, as well as Aalto University and the VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland.As Arctic sea ice melts and thins in a warming world, companies and governments are moving more cargo through the Arctic. The emerging seaways can save time and fuel, but the ice comes back whenever it’s cold, and most vessels aren’t built to handle it. Icebreaker ships lead commercial and naval vessels through icy water, clear ice from frozen ports and harbors, and rescue vessels trapped by thick sea ice.

The University of Michigan is accepting its first grant paid in cryptocurrency, coincidentally, for its continuing work in the blockchain/crypto field.In 2019, U-M was selected as one of 26 universities to join the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI)—a program funded by Ripple, one of the first fintech firms. Ripple was started by a team that includes U-M alumni. It provides governments and financial institutions the means to “move, manage and tokenize” the value of their financial resources via Ripple’s ledger (XRPL) and its stablecoin cryptocurrency, RLUSD. Ripple became famous in 2012 by cutting time and cost for international money transfers.Peter Adriaens, a U-M professor of civil and environmental engineering and the School for Environment and Sustainability, discusses the project and the payment.