UCLA CAEV (CONNECTED AUTONOMOUS ELECTRIC VEHICLE) ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Electric and Autonomous Transportation
UCLA CAEV (Connected Autonomous Electric Vehicle) Annual Conference

The trillion dollar a year automotive industry, after a century of its existence, is undergoing a radical and transformative change as a result of technologies that enable a vehicle to be fueled by electricity, be driven autonomously, to be Internet connected and be precisely located and tracked as it transports people or assets to its destination. This is resulting in the transportation sector being turned upside down with car owners, especially from the millennial generation, often opting to use shared transportation network services such as Uber or Lyft in lieu of vehicle ownership. Transportation companies such as Fair are looking into the future of on-demand leasing whereby an environment conscious passenger may in-fact request a specific electric vehicle for a short lease. With the aim of getting passengers to and from their last mile of destination, transportation sector is seeing yet a further level of innovation with the advent of micro-ride network services such as Bird, whose riders can connect to another Transit service for their longer range travel needs. Buses themselves are now becoming increasingly electrified especially in densely populated urban areas – which society is demanding by way of their regulators for the purpose of reducing greenhouse gases.

In addition to people movement, the fundamentals of transporting assets and goods are also being upended. Services such as Uber eats are delivering fully prepared meals economically to consumers as and when they want them. On the other hand, transportation of goods such as those shipped from China into the LA/Long Beach ports and from there on in 40 foot containers will in the future be performed by electric trucks instead of diesel-based trucks. We are seeing several electric truck startup companies offering products to the market – and these have the potential to soon become autonomous and be able to deliver goods to their destination without the need for a driver, use Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to reduce road congestion, and reduce green-house gases.

Fueling this change in the transportation sector is new technology in the Electric Vehicle (EV)/ Autonomous Vehicle (AV) space. A host of new companies such as Tesla, Uber, Google’s Waymo, and others, are innovating via advanced technology at a rate that has not been seen before in the field of transportation. Coupled with such innovations is the change in society’s demands towards clean and sustainable transportation by way of electricity as a fuel to reduce pollution (EVs such as Tesla), ride-sharing to reduce road congestion (Uber), and, autonomous vehicles to improve traffic safety and manage traffic more effectively (Waymo by Google, Cruise by GM). The optimized convergence of these three transportation demands coupled with advances in the relevant technologies such as communications, GPS and sensors have the potential to result in exponentially compounded progress in the automotive field.

While there is rapid innovation in automotive technologies, the infrastructure to support the above vision of sustainable transportation including automatic traffic light sensing by the vehicle, instantaneous traffic data, Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) Communications, Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communications, managing and delivering electric power wirelessly to EVs (including shuttles and people movers) while in motion, managing traffic dynamically based on real-time and historical data, detecting and avoiding pedestrians, and others, are in their early stages at best. This makes it challenging for vehicle manufacturers to innovate towards fully autonomous and all electric vehicles beyond a point. Innovations in the areas of communications, sensors, GPS, software, cloud computing, controls, energy storage, power management, battery technology, wireless EV charging during operation, cybersecurity, big data, AI, Machine Learning (ML), Data Science and Block Chains are paving the way to create the smart urban transportation infrastructure that would enable the above vision of a modern sustainable transportation future.

In UCLA, the Connected Autonomous Electric Vehicle (CAEV) Consortium is working with its stakeholders towards creating thought leadership in the field of electric and autonomous vehicles. To support this leadership activity, UCLA held its first workshop in June 2017 and a Round Table discussion with industry and government leaders in September 2018. The outcome of these two key events has propelled the need to host a technology-centric workshop on the subject which is being scheduled for March 5, 2019. At the event, UCLA faculty/researchers along with Industry and Government leadership will discuss the issues facing this fledgling field as it transitions to an industry. Topics discussed will include but not limited to:

• EV and AV Technology and Policy considerations in the California and the United States
• EV battery technologies and range considerations
• Energy management in EV and EV charging
• Advances in Autonomous Technologies
• Role of AI, ML, and Blockchain in AV development
• Advanced EV/AV product design paradigms
• GPS and sensor technology for location tracking based services
• EV charging infrastructure and relevant technologies
• Vehicle-Grid integration technologies and applications and role of electric grid operators
• Open Vehicle-Grid Communications and Controls Interface
• New EV protocols such as ISO 15118 for mobility and payments
• Using renewable energy for sustainable electric transportation
• Variable transportation modalities such as e-scooter, e-bike, e-car, e-van, e-bus and e-truck
• New models of car sharing in the context of EV and AV
• Transportation policies, regulations and last mile services in urban settings
• Technology advances and policy frameworks to keep up with such advances

In addition to creating Thought Leadership, CAEV is working to support pilot projects, proof-of-concepts, field studies and research and technology demonstrations in the California region. To support such activities, CAEV/SMERC has been developing a testbed in the campus and in the greater Los Angeles region. Plans for the development of this testbed will be shared with the event participants who will also be invited to provide input and feedback. The WINSmartEV (Wireless Internet Smart Electric Vehicle Network) testbed infrastructure developed by UCLA in the last decade with funding from U.S. Department of Energy and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (UCLA participated in the $120M DOE Smart Grid demonstration grant cooperative agreement that funded the city of Los Angeles) and deployed within the university campus and with subsequent funding outside of campus in the Port of Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Pomona, will be presented. This testbed infrastructure will be used as a foundation platform to expand into the Smart City infrastructure field testbed to support autonomous and electric vehicles as they become more ubiquitous with our Smart Cities vision. Rapid deployment of such infrastructure in California would depend in part on progress made by policy makers at the local, state and federal levels and therefore this event would bring them together with industry stakeholders at UCLA.

Sponsorship:
If you would like to become a sponsor for this conference, please email: info@smartgrid.ucla.edu

Bryan Hansel CEO Chanje	Clayton Schoeny Data Scientist Fair	Dakota Semler CEO Thor Trucks	Joseph Osha Managing Director JMP Securities LLC
Katie Sloan Principal Manager SCE	Leon Kaunitz Director of Body and Structural Engineering NIO USA, Inc.	Rajit Gadh Director UCLA Smart Grid Energy Research Center	Stefan Krause Founder Evelozcity
Stella Li Senior Vice President and President BYD Company Limited and BYD Motors Inc.	Tsu-Chin Tsao Professor UCLA Mechanical and Aerospace	Waqar Hashim VLE and VP of Global Program Management Faraday Future