The Autonomous Rail Car With 600 Mile Range

[00:00:03]Starting a business is one of those things that's easy [music] to talk about and really difficult to do.

[00:00:08]Don't you want to build better electric self-propelled rail cars?

[00:00:12]Electrification is certainly important to me. It's also pretty clear from all the energy models [music] and and environmental models that if we stop emitting, we'll stop any type of greenhouse gas emissions, which stops [music] warming.

[00:00:23]Don't you want to aim for a battery range that's somewhere in the 1 to 600 mile range?

[00:00:28]We found a sweet spot where today's battery technology is perfectly suited to moving independent rail [music] cars and we can immediately get to zero tailpipe emissions.

[00:00:38]>> In the autonomous driving space, there's so much development [music] happening.

[00:00:42]They're pushing the envelope so far, but you haven't seen the same development in other transportation modalities like rail. There's so much low-hanging fruit to capture there that it's it's really exciting.

[00:00:54]>> A vehicle like this is designed [music] to constantly be hitting other rail cars with 50 G plus shock loads. That's a massive [music] challenge that you have to think about how do you mount your sensors? How do you mount your batteries? How do you make this system structurally efficient?

[00:01:08]>> Where the MathWorks [music] products has been very useful. We're able to simulate all these different use case [music] scenarios and really help us develop really flexible systems that are effective in a variety of circumstances.

[00:01:20]>> We heard about the MathWorks [music] startup program through one of our investors. We saw that we could get 10 licenses to start working with right away at a discounted rate, which for us as a small business [music] is really important.

[00:01:31]Some of the stuff that the software team and the vehicle management system [music] team has been building is a real-time operating system. That then connects into communication layer that will communicate to things like the motor controllers.

[00:01:43]All of that we can build first digitally.

[00:01:45]We can make sure that we understand how the configuration of it works. We can use [music] Simulink and and MathWorks tools for that.

[00:01:52]>> I've had the benefit of taking a few MATLAB courses. One [music] I found out in the startup they're discounted, so I love a good deal. So, I was like, sign me up. But, I've taken the code generation course, as well as the state flow course. They've been great. The instruction's been great, the content's been [music] great, and you get, you know, a whole library of examples and a textbook.

[00:02:12]>> We are using the MathWorks trainings, we are using the MathWorks documentation, we are using the MathWorks support. And it's robust.

[00:02:20]It's pretty inspiring to see this thing running it down the tracks. Even at 4 miles an hour, the vibrations are palpable. You can feel it in your chest.

[00:02:28]And And that's just one of those really cool feelings where as an engineer, you experience that. And that's the beauty of rail.

[00:02:34]And that's the beauty of what we're building at Intramotive. [music]