Section: New Results

Optimal Energy Consumption for Urban Electric Vehicles

Participants : David Gonzalez Bautista, Vicente Milanes Montero, Joshué Pérez Rastelli.

RITS team is specially supporting two kinds of transport systems: electric mass-produced vehicles and Cybernetic Transport Systems (also electrically propelled) for urban environments. One of the key factors for getting a higher market penetration of such vehicles is their autonomy. Having this in mind, the goal of this research line is to create optimal algorithms for improving electric vehicles’ battery life. It covers two specific arenas: 1) determining optimal path planning in terms of energy saving (proposed for 2015); and 2) once the route is determined, generating an adequate speed profile for covering that path. The latter objective has been investigated during 2014. Energetic model of vehicle dynamics have been developed in order to determine the lowest consumption for each of the route segments. It has permitted to develop speed references between segments combined with polynomial transition functions for the whole route to be covered. Additionally, a high-level fuzzy controller has been also designed to make the system robust to low-level failures on reference tracking. Up to 20% of battery savings have been obtained in the first tests with the proposed algorithm, showing the proper performance of the system. Additional work for adding more information from the environment as other road agents or potential unexpected diversion on the road will be also investigated during 2015 for adapting the algorithm to more realistic environments. This work has been also developed in cooperation with MSc students from Simon Bolivar University (Venezuela) and AGMUS University System (Puerto Rico, US).