DOE Awards CMU $2.5 Million To Improve Energy Efficiency of Mobility
The U.S. Department of Energy recently selected 42 projects totaling $80 million to support advanced vehicle technologies that can enable more affordable mobility, strengthen domestic energy security, reduce our dependence on foreign sources of critical materials and enhance U.S. economic growth.
Among the projects selected are two from Carnegie Mellon University. The project, “Understanding and improving energy efficiency of regional mobility systems leveraging system-level data,” is in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, Pittsburgh Region Clean Cities and The City of Pittsburgh. The CMU team includes:
- Sean Qian, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Heinz College, assistant professor;
- Chris Hendrickson, Hamerschlag University Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering;
- Jeremy Michalek, Mechanical Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy professor;
- H. Scott Matthews, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy professor; and
- Costa Samaras, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy associate professor.
This research, supported by CMU’s Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and Metro21: Smart Cities Institute, “proposes to intensively review inexpensive, replicable and openly-accessible data from multi-modal systems, develop a data-driven system-level modeling framework enabled and validated by data, identify the energy inefficiencies of mobility systems from infrastructure, vehicles and travelers and quantify the benefits of system-level strategies to improve mobility and energy efficiency,” said Qian, director of CMU’s Mobility Data Analytics Center.
The second CMU project, “Drones, delivery robots, driverless cars, and intelligent curbs for increasing energy productivity of first/last mile goods movement” is from a team of Scott Institute faculty affiliates: Sebastian Scherer, senior systems scientist at The Robotics Institute, Sean Qian, Alexandre Jacquillat, Heinz College and Tepper School of Business assistant professor, Jeremy Michalek and Costa Samaras, lead principal investigator and Scott Institute energy fellow.
“This research evaluates pathways for improving energy productivity of first/last mile mobility for goods movement by taking a systems approach to advanced mobility,” said Samaras.