Master Thesis Battery Management

What is our offer to you?


Imagine being surrounded everyday by a diverse, fun, and passionate group of colleagues every day who you get to work with and enjoy eating lunch and having fika with. Now imagine that you work with these colleagues on some of the most advanced autonomous vehicle technology in the world. Add that you are working with these colleagues on this advanced technology in a culture that promotes growth, collaboration, trust and is striving to be the best autonomous solution verification and validation organization in the world!


Are you ready to join our team as a thesis worker and be part of shaping the future of the transportation industry with us?


The team


The Cloud team is a part of the global technology organization at Volvo Autonomous Solutions. We design the solutions of the future including teleoperation, connectivity and, cloud services for autonomous fleet, traffic and productivity management. We are driven by the vision that our innovations will meet and exceed expectations from customers and contribute to a society that we want to live in.


This is what we do at Volvo Autonomous Solutions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TOCGC6Uuc




Background to the thesis work


Right now there is a strong automation trend in the vehicle business and all vehicle manufacturers are working in this field to build knowledge and develop products. Volvo Autonomous solutions is a part of the Volvo Group dedicated to develop self-driving trucks and machines. One vehicle that we are automating is the battery-electric vehicle TA15 seen in Figure 1. This is a small dumptruck used in quarries and mines to move rock material. Since it is fully electric it is a truly disruptive product with the property that it can lower the CO2 emissions in the quarry and mining business significantly.


However, since it is battery-electric, one important task for the control system will be to manage the battery level. The reason for this is to avoid running out of energy while at the same time not spending too much time charging since it takes time and therefore has a negative effect on the productivity of the site. Hence, the charging strategy, which includes both when and how much to charge, will be extremely important to achieve maximum productivity of the quarry or mine. How to do this is the topic for this thesis work.


Scope and plan


The scope of this thesis is to study different concepts for how and when to charge in order to maximize the productivity of the machines.


Milestones:
A first step is to develop a relatively simple rule-based approach and do a simulation study of how efficient it is. This will be a very important step since it creates a baseline going forward.
A second step is to do a sensitivity analysis of how the rule-based approach handles variations in the site. This could, for instance, what bench is used, which loading position is used on the benches, etc.
After the two first steps there are several possible ways forward. One way could be to look into if data driven approaches can improve productivity more than the simple rule-based approach. Another way could be to analyze if more site information could help and so on.
The evaluation should be carried out both in a simulation environment but also on real machines.



Deliverables:


A report summarizing the developed algorithms and the results.
Code in Matlab and ROS (Robotic Operating System).


Who are you?


We are looking for two curious, engaged and highly motivated students that wants to work in a very kind and ambitious team with solutions that will truly change the world.


If this sounds interesting (we really hope it does – we love our jobs!) just send in your application and we will be thrilled to start getting to know you.


Curious, and would like to know more? Contact me:
Johan Sjöberg, Manager Edge, +46 16 541 47 72


Kindly note that due to GDPR, we will not accept applications via mail. Please use our career site.