Uncrewed Systems Technology 047 l Aergility ATLIS l AI focus l Clevon 1 UGV l Geospatial insight l Intergeo 2022 report l AUSA 2022 report I Infinity fuel cell l BeeX A.IKANBILIS l Propellers focus I Phoenix Wings Orca

52 the rear axle, each outputting 3 kW for a total of 6 kW (8.15 bhp), with the batteries placed below the undercarriage to keep the centre of gravity as low as possible. “The battery modules use lithium titanate oxide [LTO] cells from Toshiba,” Agur says. “It’s a fantastically safe cathode chemistry, and means you can literally hammer a nail through the pack and it doesn’t leak or catch fire, which is huge for operating safely on roads alongside human drivers. “It also allows for fast charging without reducing their lifespan – we can go from 20% to 80% in 45 minutes, and since we use wireless charging technology, we can top up while loading or unloading. That means we can theoretically keep each Clevon 1 working 24/7. And Toshiba is a mass-manufacturer of these systems, which suits our supply chain and production requirements neatly. “Moreover, the capacities of LTO cells do not decrease significantly with time, so there’s no need to change the batteries over the vehicle’s lifespan. That lowers the total cost of ownership because, as is widely known, battery replacement costs are often the most expensive part of EV maintenance.” By default, four battery modules with 5 kWh altogether are installed (hence 1.25 kWh each, or Clevon can integrate just two modules with 2.5 kWh each), but the vehicle can carry less energy if the use case does not need 5 hours between charges. The wireless charging module is Wiferion’s etaLINK 3000, which allows up to 3000 W of charging (at up to 93% efficiency) on 30-60 V, functional within 40 mm distance from emitter to receiver. Computers and internal network The ‘brain’ of the Clevon 1 is a Drive AGX Xavier computer, powered by two eight- core Carmel CPUs based on the ARMv8 instruction set architecture. It features deep-learning accelerators functioning at 10 TOPS (when using INT8 quantisation) or 5 TFLOPS (in FP16), Nvidia’s Volta integrated GPU, programmable vision accelerators, a 1.5 Gpixel/s image signal processor, a 1.2 Gpixel/s video encoder and a 1.8 Gpixel/s video decoder, with 136 Gbyte/s memory bandwidth. “There aren’t a lot of development kits out there for commercial-grade autonomous vehicles, but Nvidia offers very good support for companies in the start-up phase of r&d – we’re definitely planning to go with them in the long term,” Appo says. “And we were able to get the production-ready variants of the AGX Xaviers, so they were already in compact, integrated form factors when we took delivery of them. Their computational power was certainly good when we started development, but we’re already looking towards Nvidia’s Orin as the next generation of self-driving computer as we develop each user’s applications and edge cases.” Agur adds, “Nvidia have said we’ve gone the furthest of any autonomous car using their technology, so at this point it’s more of a partnership than a supplier relationship.” A distributed network spreads outwards December/January 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The antennas for 4G and GNSS sit atop the tower at the front of the vehicle One of the six Sekonix cameras installed about the Clevon 1, each giving a 120 º horizontal FoV