ORNL gets $3.36 million award for vehicle research

OAK RIDGE — Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been awarded $3.36 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to develop control technologies for connected and automated vehicles, according to a news release from the lab.

The project's goal is to achieve a 20 percent improvement in vehicle energy efficiency. It will focus on developing and adopting technologies in a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle to achieve the following: compute optimal routing to bypass bottlenecks, accidents, special events and other conditions that affect traffic flow; accelerate and decelerate based on traffic conditions and the state of the surrounding roads; and optimize onboard powertrain efficiency.

"This approach changes the mathematical framework of how the vehicle is controlled and optimized today. With our proposed concept, the vehicle will no longer operate in isolation but will be considered as part of an integrated system, which ultimately could help increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said ORNL’s Andreas Malikopoulos, the project’s principal investigator.

Other investigators on the project include: Christos Cassandras of Boston University; Li Jiang of Robert Bosch, LLC; and Huei Peng of the University of Michigan.

ORNL received this competitive award 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.