Principal Investigator:
Will Northrop, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Project Summary:
In this proposed SBIR project, Exergi Predictive, LLC will develop a connected energy management
system (c-EMS) for application in the nascent electrified last-mile delivery truck market, building
on its current product offering for range-extended hybrid delivery trucks. With increasing desire
to decarbonize, lower maintenance costs, and meet increasing regulatory requirements in urban
areas, delivery fleets are motivated to electrify large portions of their fleets. Although the driving
range of electric vehicles (EVs) is increasing as battery technology matures, many delivery routes
are not possible to achieve with current vehicles. Range anxiety is therefore a key factor in steering
fleet operators away from adopting electric vehicles. To solve this challenge, the goal of the
proposed project is to accurately predict the range of last-mile delivery EVs for a given route
and to reduce the need for expensive on-route charging.
The University of Minnesota is a sub-recipient on the grant and will develop new machine learning algorithms for predicting battery SOC trajectory for a future route using historical and exogeneous data.