IIT-Guwahati develops AI-based tool for electric vehicle motor

The Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati (IIT-G) Saturday announced the development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted engineering system design tool for developing the motor of an electric vehicle.

The tool, 'Smart-Engineer', seeks to address one of the primary hurdles in indigenising the electric vehicle (EV) technology -- the lack of trained human resources in engineering design and system integration, IIT-G said in a statement here.

'Smart-Engineer' was built by the e-mobility lab (EML) of the institute by a team of four PhD and post-graduate students -- Rajendra Kumar, Bikash Sah, Ankit Vishway and Rajendra Kumar.

The statement said the EML developed an AI-based electric motor designer to help a novice design engineer to design a motor for EV application in the first phase without the need for much intervention from experts.

"The Smart-Engineer enables the fresh engineer to learn from the collective knowledge and wisdom of the experts without necessarily having to interact with them," it added.

Whenever the design engineer has some query, the Smart-Engineer can be consulted to get the answer.

Prof Praveen Kumar of Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at IIT-G said, "The current version of Smart-Engineer is able to address the fundamentals involved in the design of induction motors. The early results are very promising.

"We now intend to expand the capability of Smart- Engineer to include the finer aspects of motor design. We are compiling the know-why of motor design that we have gathered over the years in the e-mobility lab," he said.

IIT-G said the significant advantage of the Smart-Engineer is it helps the engineer to climb the steep learning curve of motor design in the shortest possible time.

"Eventually, the capabilities of Smart-Engineer will be enhanced to address the other domains of EV such as power electronics, control systems, battery management systems among others," it added.