Following up with Mr. Inderveer Singh the Founder and CEO of Ekinematics a startup based out of Punjab India who is on a mission to develop electric mobility for the masses we find out that the development for the vehicle is almost complete and the company is busy plying the finishing touches to the vehicle, the team took some time from the busy schedule to update on the dev ops taking place at the fabrication site and the progress the team has made in the past three months on the vehicle.
The vehicle being designed is an autonomous shuttle and Autonomous Ground Vehicle, the shuttle would have a capacity for 8-12 passengers on board and AGV would have a payload of 600 Kgs. The company released the first sketch for the vehicle as shown above in the article.
On asking Mr. Inderveer he is quick to point out that the vehicle is complete in the chassis fabrication and power train assembly and is complete and readily being vigorously tested to be road ready. The key challenges he believe were to develop a chassis frame that is light enough and rigid to meet the demands of the daily commute, the solution to that was developing an aluminium composite chassis which is a first of its kind in India and that makes it among the lightest constructions with the required rigidity for the vehicle. The Second challenge was to develop the motor that was light enough and efficient enough to provide the necessary torque to the wheels and the team developed a BLDC motor and its control system that delivers an efficiency of 90% or more, this incidentally makes the motor among the best power to weight ratio being used in the automotive world.
The vehicle also uses Lithium Ion Battery pack that would provide the vehicle with a range of 120 Miles, with an option of range extender of additional 100 miles. This is probably the first vehicle in India that is truly electric and supports the kind of range mentioned in the interview, the tests are underway and the team is hopeful of outperforming on the range mentioned above, however until the final results are out the figures are possible to change. The battery could be recharged in the under 2 hours and also can be plugged to a fast charger for charging time of close to 45 mins.
For the autonomous capability the vehicle shall be loaded with six high depth cameras with very high speed rates and sensor array along with radars for forward reverse data sensing, this makes the approach different as it eliminates the LiDar’s from the array and thus makes the system more economical to mount on vehicles. The backend of this all is a high end GPU and multi CPU cores which have AI based software and Machine Learning that allows the machine to differentiate objects, humans, vehicles, road signs, traffic signals etc. The team has been training the AI on simulated scenarios and has trained it for more than 50,000 hours and increasing it daily, apart from the simulation the actual vehicle has been tested for 2500 hours on actual usage conditions. The company envisions making the vehicle Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous with full capability at 25 Mph.
Mr. Inderveer hopes to make the vehicles run as autonomous shuttles taking people on fixed routes to start with and then make it available on demand as the technology and infrastructure becomes more mature. Additionally the vehicle is designed on a modular platform and the vehicles will also be used as an AGV that would be used for delivering goods to customers directly. The first customers for the technology would be mobility users in restricted environment such as Universities, Old age homes and resorts etc. The vehicle would be officially launched in August and the company would be open for Reservations at the official launch.
Here is wishing to the team and Mr. Inderveer Singh the best for the future and hope this inspires entrepreneurs to take the beaten path and move towards make the world a better place and make the collaborative efforts to improve the earth.
Media Contact
Company Name: Ekinematics
Contact Person: Inderveer Singh Panesar
Email: Send Email
Phone: +918894364402
Address:SCO-100, Sector 47-C
City: CHANDIGARH
State: PUNJAB – 160047
Country: India
Website: www.ekinematics.com