The Renewable Energy Vehicle Project (REV) at The University of Western Australia has teamed up with local start-up company Stealth Technologies to develop a new versatile autonomous electric vehicle platform.
REV project lead Professor Thomas Bräunl, from UWA's Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, said the golf-cart-sized vehicle was being developed for its first commercial customer Honeywell, but clearly had a large market potential in several application areas, including surveillance, delivery and defence.
REV together with Stealth Technologies and EV Works, the Australian distributor for Winston cells and batteries, have won around $500,0000 in Federal Government funding for research and student education in automotive engineering.
The objective of the Automotive Engineering Graduate program is to help automotive businesses grow, improve productivity and be globally competitive by increasing the pipeline of high quality graduate engineers into Australia's automotive engineering sector.
A team of four UWA researchers will collaborate with experts from Stealth Technologies on the commercial development of the company's technology.
Stealth Technologies was founded by UWA Engineering graduate Elliot Nicholls while all Stealth employees are also recent UWA Engineering graduates. Mr Nicholls has a distinguished career in technology development at Strategic Elements Ltd, a Federal Government-registered pooled development fund that funds and develops projects in the technology and resource sector.
Strategic Elements operates as a 'venture builder' where it generates high risk-high reward ventures and projects from combining teams of leading scientists or innovators in the technology or resources sectors.
Professor Braunl said he was very pleased to see one of his engineering graduates return to UWA to start an exciting new company and was looking forward to a successful collaboration.
"We have great engineering graduates at UWA and giving them a perspective to work on state-of-the art robotic vehicles and AI systems in Perth is fantastic," he said.
Strategic Elements Managing Director Charles Murphy said the platform under development incorporated autonomous vehicles, robotics and computer vision and the company was receiving increased demand as a response to the current global environment.
