Knowledge Is Battery Power

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Smart battery management software traces lineage to work with NASA

Modern electric vehicles can go hundreds of miles without a recharge, but that long range can diminish faster if battery health isn’t properly tracked and managed. And to do that, you need some smart software — and some smarts from working with NASA.

“Whether it’s for a balloon or a drone or a rover, we realized that for anything we are working on, you needed a complex system of batteries and energy storage, and every time, the software makes a difference,” said Fabrizio Martini, founder of Electra Vehicles Inc.

Based in Boston, Electra was founded in 2015. Around that time, Martini was the principal investigator on two Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. These focused on creating power systems for long-duration balloon and rover missions, organized with Martini’s then-employer FastCAP Systems Corp. After six months, the company ultimately developed a high-energy capacitor and achieved the goals set in the contract for the battery management software.

“We ended up using three batteries — one primary and two secondary,” said Martini. “In order to manage these three systems, you need a control strategy. Something to manage the energy flow between them, and so you need an accurate battery management model to come up with that control plan.”

While the SBIR did not proceed beyond Phase I, Martini believed some of the developments made in active energy management on balloons could be transferred to electric vehicles. With some negotiations, FastCAP transferred the work done on the management system and its intellectual property to Electra Vehicles, and Martini began working at Electra full-time as the CEO and cofounder.

Unlike most battery management systems, which passively manage how power is distributed, Electra’s battery management system uses machine learning and AI to determine how and when the battery cells are most used, and to make sure the cells all have that power when they need it. This helps keep efficiency high and ensure battery longevity.

Martini says Electra is in the “business-to-business” technology market, which means most of its sales are to companies that create vehicles and components, as opposed to consumers. The battery efficiency measurements are especially important to companies operating vehicle fleets, where ensuring cars last for years means conserving battery life for as long as possible.

The company has cultivated relationships with battery manufacturers like LG, and partnerships with automakers such as Stellantis, which is introducing electric vehicles to several of its brands. One of these vehicles, the Fiat 500e, uses Electra’s battery management technology, and Electra demonstrated it by driving from Italy to London on a single charge. A second showcase used a Tesla Cybertruck to demonstrate how its battery intelligence system can boost range, performance, and thermal management. Martini credits his time working with NASA for bringing some of the inventiveness needed to travel to other worlds back to traveling on this planet.

“I often say working with NASA was the most inspiring time of my life. Because the framework of NASA is to really think out of the box and look for people with the capability to say yes to trying something, even if it seems impossible,” he said.