Appeal For Commuter GPS Logs To Aid Electric Cars

holy_calamity writes "A team at Carnegie Mellon University has begun a project seeking to design a kit to cheaply convert secondhand cars into cheap, electric ones suitable for commuting, if little else. They hope to rely heavily on smart management software to extract as much efficiency as possible from regenerative braking, and knowledge of terrain from GPS tracking. But they are hampered by a lack of public data on how commuters actually drive. Their solution is to appeal to GPS users to upload .gpx log files of their commute to the team's site. The data is plugged into a simulator that reveals how much cheaper an electric car could do your journey, and an anonymized public dataset will be created. A programming contest will award a production electric car to the coder who designs the best management algorithm using it."

Regenerative breaking?

[Shadyman]

Is that where they break, and then fix themselves?

I am Car of Borg. You will be assimilated.

Re:Regenerative breaking?

[olsmeister]

A variant of ye olde perpetual motion machine.

Re:My experience

[Brian Gordon]

Yeah I wrote time travel algorithms for freeway travel in my last job. The queue travel was pretty much directly related to the length of the freeway at the end of time.