We have received gift funding to begin a new project in the CREATE lab (www.communityrobotics.org) that we are calling "Power Discovery"- which will be akin to "drug discovery" as applied to active control of batteries for electric vehicles. Specifically we are going to design new low-cost power control modules for battery testing (and open-source the design so that many university groups can benefit); then do very large-scale sensitivity analysis of battery performance varying the following features of the system:

• environmental conditions
• driving behavior (rather than depending on default ABC150-style driving schedules)
• current bandpass filtering using ultracap / supercap "buffers"

By collecting data away from the well-known power schedules usually used for testing, then doing comprehensive data mining, we wish to show if in fact there are factors that are controllable that can have significant impact on the economics of BEV's - by, for instance, enabling the use of much less expensive lower-rate Li-ion batteries. Just an example. 

We are also going to start a student organization and give them the resources to run with this, as well as a community group in Pittsburgh