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Electric Vehicle Battery Plant Internship

Background

I interned with Ford Motor Company over the summer of 2024 at the BlueOvalSK Battery Park in Glendale, KY. My role as an intern was to join the onsite Ford team with various responsibilities related to overseeing plant construction to ensure a smooth completion, as if I was a full-time engineer on the team, and much of our work related to project management. Here are the most notable tasks I completed over the summer:

Cognex Image Classification

A demonstration of using Cognex's software platform for image classification - Note the red bounding box and the flavor label.
A demonstration of reading characters and numbers, in the local region underneath the QR code.

Overview: Plant leaders considered installing Cognex cameras, which are cameras are specialized for automated manufacturing systems. I demonstrate the use of their software platform, the In-Sight Vision Suite, for image classification to my manager as well as the Ford leadership team.
This platform provides an intuitive interface for training an actual Cognex Camera on some kind of specific task, and there is potential for this to extend to extremely useful applications like battery defect detection: Catching critical defects before the batteries go through the extremely time-consuming process of formation.

Automated Updating of Equipment Status Spreadsheets with VBA

Overview: On our team, we kept spreadsheets tracking the installation status of plant equipment. Contractors would provide an update, and it was very tedious to go through the spreadsheet line-by-line to update each equipment's status. I wrote VBA code that, when ran, performs the updates automatically to drastically cut this process down to a few seconds.

PLC Lift Simulation

Overview: All Ford engineers must go through PLC training, specifically with Mitsubishi's PLC and HMI (Human-machine interface) software. This is a lift simulation I developed with Mitsubishi's platform.