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Saturday, 18 November 2017 16:26

Team Arrow to bring world-first clean electric car to market

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Step over, Tesla. Team Arrow, an Australian non-profit, high-tech, renewable energy think-tank, is bringing its solar-powered race car to the streets.

By day, Cameron Tuesley is the managing director of technology firm Integral, but by nights and weekends, he is part of a crew researching high-tech energy options, putting these concepts into practice by racing cars across Australia.

In 2012, Integral was working on energy programmes and Tuesley saw an opportunity to create an incubator for high-tech renewable energy concepts, particularly in his home state of Queensland. “We’re the ‘sunshine state’ for a reason,” he jokes.

Tuesley created this incubator in partnership with Queensland University of Technology, partnering engineering students with industry, and focusing these keen minds on renewable energy solutions.

The most visible activity of Team Arrow is building solar and electric cars which are then raced around Australia in domestic and global solar challenges.

It sounds fun, but Tuesley advises “a lot of commercial spin-offs come from the race. It pushes technology and this leads to new learnings.”

An example, Tuesley says, is “a 98% efficient motor the CSIRO devised for the race. This basic design now runs in washing machines around the world". Tesla itself benefited from initiatives devised from solar racing at Stamford University, he states.

Similarly, Team Arrow is pushing the field of solar cells and battery management in its own endeavours to make the ultimate solar-powered and electric race car.

This car can be yours in the near future. “We’re planning to commercialise the car itself in late 2018. It will be built to order and is fairly unique,” Tuesley says.

This car is the Arrow STF, for Sports Touring Framework, and is road-registrable, having been built to more stringent Australian Design Regulation standards than to race specifications.

“It has proper side impact, crumple zones, it handles rolls, it can take 10t on the roof,” Tuesley says. “In the second half of 2018 we will make it available to people who want to buy one. It’s $250,000 for a hand-built, carbon fibre, solar efficient car. We drove the race version 640km in one day under cloud; it’s a perfectly practical road-going car. It is aerodynamic and light, but strong as well with efficient cells and battery.

"It is the only genuinely clean electric car in the world that you can buy.”

Recently, Team Arrow and the STF placed third out of 42 teams across two categories. The number one and two teams had 70, and 62, people respectively, and multi-million dollar budgets each. Conversely, Team Arrow operates on 14 people and 1/30th of the budget of its nearest rival.

Tuesley credits the lean operations to leveraging the team’s strength in IT and in data. “It’s one area we could get a competitive advantage without spending a huge amount of money,” he says.

Team Arrow uses open source software and has also fostered strong relationships with software vendors who contribute software free. Being a commercial user of Splunk in his day job, Tuesley brought his Splunk skills to the non-profit high-tech energy world as well. “We basically have the same problems as people in the commercial world,” he said. “We have to build a highly-redundant data centre and deal with 600 pieces of information from the car per second. However, we do it while driving 100 kilometres per hour.”

Team Arrow benefited from Splunk’s Splunk4Good programme which pledged $100 million in Splunk software licences and training over 10 years.

Team Arrow developed custom machine-learning software to determine the optimal performance configuration of the vehicle. Splunk ingests 600 readings per second from the car, and the custom software provides guidance on how to adjust for optimal race settings.

TeamArrow1

In its most recent race, the software advised Team Arrow they needed to focus on the time window — landing in Alice Springs within a specific three-hour period — and so the crew pushed the car to drive over 600 kilometres in one day. They hit the time window, one of only three teams to do so, and scored third place overall despite a team and budget that paled in comparison to others.

“Some of the data points are more useful than others,” Tuesley says. “There’s a difference in knowing the indicator is on than knowing the battery is on fire.”

Being able to filter the important pieces of data, and find events and correlate information, through Splunk and custom software has given Team Arrow its strength. “Software is important to us,” he says. 
Incredibly, and unlike most enterprises, this happens while travelling in a car at speed.

“There’s no Internet for much of the race,” Tuesley notes. “We adopted a whole bunch of technology to make it work for us. We found Wi-Fi antennas which communicate across campuses and adapted them to make a spanned Wi-Fi network across the top of our cars, with range a few kilometres back and forth.

“We don’t run the solar car by itself. We run other vehicles for maintenance and monitoring. We can have people on tablets and communicating or using Splunk and talking about strategy or battery issues. We can use instant messaging to communicate privately. It’s like we have a little corporate environment travelling at high speed.”

TeamArrow2

Team Arrow retains its data collected during the race for future analysis. “We can make a change to the vehicle and compare the performance now against the performance last year in Splunk. This really allows us to optimise it. We can go through very large data sets in a way we weren’t thinking about it when we first recorded it, for example, what was the power drop when we switched the headlights on? We have all this data in Splunk and can look back on it,”Tuesley says.

Team Arrow will continue its data-driven approach in the commercial vehicle. “Once we start driving the car on the road we plan to continuously record as it is driving around, and have very comprehensive data sets of the vehicle and how it performs,” he says.

“When you make power out of completely clean sources you can change the world."

The Arrow STF is still under development but you can register your interest in buying now, with release planned to be within the second half of 2018.

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David M Williams

David has been computing since 1984 where he instantly gravitated to the family Commodore 64. He completed a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from 1990 to 1992, commencing full-time employment as a systems analyst at the end of that year. David subsequently worked as a UNIX Systems Manager, Asia-Pacific technical specialist for an international software company, Business Analyst, IT Manager, and other roles. David has been the Chief Information Officer for national public companies since 2007, delivering IT knowledge and business acumen, seeking to transform the industries within which he works. David is also involved in the user group community, the Australian Computer Society technical advisory boards, and education.

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