Increasing Mobility Energy Productivity, Operational Efficiency, with Low-Speed Automation for On-Demand Transit or Goods Movement in First-Mile/Last-Mile

Whether it is moving goods or people, last mile hub and depot activities are the most expensive and time-consuming part of the transportation and mobility value chain. These areas of close proximity, low speed driving, tight turns, and need to move rapidly result in stress, anxiety, fender bender accidents and damage. When none of the above occurs, then the downtime the fleet vehicles experience is still substantial enough to decrease overall transportation journey. Data from several telematic companies show that these hubs are least efficient in terms of productivity per mile, and per minute. The biggest challenges in operational efficiency being increasing batches, reduced batch sizes, non-repeating routes and low fuel optimization. Further, human and energy resources are limited in productivity due to reliance on physical mobility associated with in-depot services. For perspective, according to the Department of Energy, last year vehicles transported 11B tons of freight, over $32 billion worth of goods daily, and moved people over 3 trillion vehicle-miles. Of these approximately 25% of the costs were associated with depot navigation, management, staging, fueling, washing etc. STEER Tech, along with NREL, propose the novel integration of low speed autonomous (LSA) capability into existing fleet vehicles via retrofit that presents an opportunity to optimize productivity. This novel approach can provide up to 30% energy optimization, and 12.5% increased existing workforce throughput for an overall 25% increase in mobility energy productivity. As more services are integrated into the LSA ecosystem (example: vehicle washing, daily inspections, maintenance runs) this number is expected to rise further. Building on established credibility and technology portfolio of STEER Tech to provide low-speed, high-precision vehicle maneuvering, the proposed technology will enhance fleet vehicles with a higher level of automated management through in-vehicle retrofittable AV technology, in-app mission control for fleet administrators, and an intelligent dashboard for monitoring, predictive analytics and workflow automation. This trifecta results in seamless coordination, automated controlled execution and efficient utilization of human and energy resources. When automated vehicles drive themselves to fueling lines or EVSEs, dock and undock themselves when done, and drive back to an open parking spot, they free up resources for other vehicles to utilize thereby increasing EVSE utilization rates and accelerating corporate decarbonization strategies. Saving valuable time of human resources facilitates driving longer routes, delivering more goods per route, picking up transit passengers earlier and reduced downtime for productive vehicles. Further, NRELĺs established experience in the energy productivity metrics space, will provide solid analysis to back these claims. The STEER-NREL team proposes that before creating a turn key solution in Phase II that maps out the offering, captures business workflow and operational workflow for minimal disruption and realizing the savings, we will use Phase I to technically and conceptually verify feasibility of such a solution. Our approach will be a combination of a market survey of the last mile transportation entities, interviews with stakeholders, analyzing the technical and business feasibility of such a solution, substantiating it with realistic economic drivers that are based on stakeholder inputs, and then delivering a specification for a scalable solution that can be industrialized in Phase II. In addition, we will also create a mockup rapid prototype after feasibility and gap analysis to demonstrate the concept in visuals. A second additional item proposed is to survey inductive charging vendors to create a potential Phase III follow on with inductive + autonomous solution for even more enhanced sustainable benefits.