How UNSW’s Sunswift Racing and Ericsson achieved cross-country connectivity in Australia’s outback
Motor racing is a challenge for all involved, but some races push engineering teams to the technological limit, necessitating new approaches and innovations to finish the course – let alone set record times.
The Bridgestone World Solar Challenge is one such event. Held since 1987, the biennial event sees teams from all over the world run solar powered cars from Darwin in the north of Australia to Adelaide on the country’s southern coast. The 3,022 km route across the outback takes days to complete.
Finishing the event in any year is an accomplishment and perhaps no team knows this better than Sunswift Racing, the University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) solar racing team, which has entered the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge on 11 separate occasions and won in 2023.
Throughout the race, the team has to constantly broadcast data between the solar car and the convoy so the team can track the car’s battery percentage, cell voltages, phase currents, and health of onboard systems.
“If we lose data for even a moment, if something were to happen with the car or there were warning signs being thrown up that something might be occurring, we lose access to that. We lost access to data we need to execute our strategy as we wanted to run the car as efficiently as possible,” says Luke Tedesco, project officer at Sunswift Racing and a recent computer science graduate at the UNSW.
“So you need permanent, constant connectivity to get second by second data in a situation and in conditions where you’re not really set up for that necessarily.”
All of the team’s kit, including laptops, tablets, and dash cams, also needed reliable internet connections.
To achieve this, the team worked with Ericsson to set up a lightweight, low latency mobile solution for 5G connectivity on the move. In part, this meant carrying Cradlepoint in-vehicle wireless wide area network (WWAN) routers in the convoy cars that drive ahead and behind Sunswift 7, which the solar car could connect to via an onboard receiver.
As an added challenge, for Sunswift 7 the team wanted to livestream the entire race online, necessitating a constant upload speed of around 32 Mbits/sec – even in the most remote stretches of the outback.
The specific model used, the Cradlepoint R1900 Ruggedised 5G Edge Router, is capable of connecting to low-Earth orbit satellite broadband in areas without any traditional connectivity.
When crossing the outback, Sunswift Racing and Ericsson leveraged this to connect to the Starlink network, with the rear convoy car carrying a Starlink dish that helped keep all data flowing uninterrupted throughout the race.
“You’ve got to remember that it’s probably easier, nowadays, to livestream from the Moon than it is through the center of Australia,” says Richard Hopkins, professor of practice at UNSW who has acted as team principal at Sunswift Racing since 2018. “So we’re choosing to introduce technology at its extremes and to be able to achieve that is quite exceptional.”
Hopkins pays tribute to the hard work of the 100 undergraduate students, across engineering and business, who make up the Sunswift Racing team. Starting out as an extracurricular project, in 2020 UNSW made the decision to offer the race as an elective subject, meaning all the students who work on the car are given the opportunity to stay with the team from their second year until their graduation or on into their Master’s program.
This empowers them with skills in the renewable energy and sustainability spaces, generates interest in the university, and educates the industry partners as well as the students, Hopkins says.
“The project, I think, creates an opportunity, a unique learning experience that makes these students extraordinarily employable and career ready, that’s one of the intentions of it.
Far from simply acquiring ready-made components from partners like Ericsson, the Sunswift Racing team collaborates closely with them and seeks to solve challenges that the industry partner can’t solve at the outset.
In the future, Sunswift Racing is targeting new innovation success with Sunswift 8, a car which will be powered by a mixture of solar and hydrogen fuel cell technology. The team are eventually aiming to integrate Ericsson’s technology into a car that can be productionized, rather than continuing to iterate prototypes.
“We’re going closer, once again bridging that gap between the Jetsons of old and the reality of the world that we’re living in today, that’s very innovation hungry” Hopkins says.
He says Sunswift and Ericsson’s solutions could in the future help the Australian State Emergency Service (SES) to operate during bushfires, floods, and cyclones.
“I’m not being too melodramatic but if the help we can provide through these solutions to problems can help save lives, then I think that’s a realistically good reason for doing what we’re doing.”
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