Team Led by ME Professor Francesco Borrelli Awarded $3 Million from US Department of Energy

A team led by ME Professor Francesco Borrelli has been awarded $3.33 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy ARPA-E. The funding will be used to develop an innovative Vehicle Dynamics and Powertrain VD&PT control architecture based on a predictive and data-driven approach.

The team, which also consists of ME Professors Roberto Horowitz and Karl Hedrick, Professor Scott Moura CEE, and Dr. Jacopo Guanetti Postdoc in MPC Lab, believes this approach will optimize PHEV performance in real-world conditions, and facilitate efficient departure at intersections, predictive cruise and speed profiles, and learning-based eco-routing and tuning. The proposed VD&PT control architecture will operate in a coordinated manner over short-, medium-, and long-term targets while being optimized in real time, based on the predicted behavior of the vehicle and inputs from the surrounding environment. The system will also crowdsource real-time and historical data on drivers’ origins and destinations, traffic conditions, infrastructure, road grade, and road curvature to improve individual vehicle operating efficiency.

This competitive award comes from ARPA-E’s NEXT-Generation Energy Technologies for Connected and Automated On-Road Vehicles NEXTCAR program, which seeks to leverage vehicle connectivity and automation technologies to optimize vehicle controls and powertrain operation. Using Vehicle-to-Vehicle V2V, Vehicle-to-Infrastructure V2I, and Vehicle-to-Everything V2X technologies, NEXTCAR projects will enable better communication between and coordination of vehicle-level and powertrain-level actions, improving individual vehicle and, ultimately, fleet efficiency.

Hyundai Motor Company and Sensys Network will also be supporting the team as industrial partners.