IIT-Delhi

NEW DELHI: IIT-Delhi will soon have an indigenously developed autonomous (driverless) electric vehicle running on the campus to transport people within the campus, its director V Ramgopal Rao announced on Monday. He informed that the institute’s multiple departments have come together for this initiative and the newly formed Centre for Automotive Research & Tribology is taking a lead in this respect.

Rao stated that researchers at IIT are working on a project to design an end-to-end sustainable solution for electric vehicles. He said the car is likely to be up and functioning in the next six months.

“The Smart Infrastructure for an Electric Vehicle Ecosystem project is a multidisciplinary project spread across four departments: computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical engineering.”

Speaking to TOI, Rao said IIT had collaborated with communication services company Ericsson and telecom company Reliance Jio to develop a 5G connected car.

He added that currently there is a strong push for the adoption and indigenisation of electric vehicle technology. Given that an EV requires at least 60-100W of power while fast-charging, the process of charging has to be regulated. This requires novel techniques that regulate the charging power, and optimally place charging stations.

“We are working on designing smart, scalable, and secure protocols for charging and operating EVs. This will require innovations in the IoT hardware used in EVs, and a secure charging infrastructure,” said professor Smruti Sarangi from the computer science and engineering department, who is the principal investigator of the project.

There are four distinct components in this project — design of Redox flow batteries, electric vehicle, charging technologies, IoT-based communication and management and self-driving algorithms.

Professor Anil Verma from chemical engineering is leading the effort on designing vanadium-oxide Redox flow batteries. Sunil Jha from the mechanical engineering department is working on creating a novel self-driving algorithm for Indian roads.

