WORKHORSE ENTERS INTO STRATEGIC AGREEMENTS WITH HITACHI CAPITAL AMERICA
Early in September Workhorse Group, an American technology company focused on providing sustainable and cost-effective electric drone-integrated vehicles to the last-mile delivery sector, announced newly-formed strategic agreements between the Company an
Under these agreements, Hitachi America and other Hitachi Group companies (Hitachi) will provide an operational assessment of Workhorse’s manufacturing, operational and supply chain capabilities, benchmark to best-in-class standards and provide recommendations to Workhorse that support the Company’s increased production requirements. Hitachi will leverage its Smart Manufacturing, data-driven digital solutions and Electric Vehicle (EV) technologies, powered by Hitachi’s rapid-solution-delivery platform, Lumada. In addition, Hitachi Capital America will assist in developing a national dealer network and will support Workhorse’s sales with vehicle financing options for both dealers and customers, including dealer floor-plan programmes.
“This alliance with Hitachi comes at an ideal time for Workhorse as we value their best in class innovation and experience in ramping up production and enabling us in providing a complete solution to our customers,” said Workhorse CEO Duane Hughes. “With Hitachi’s innovation and invaluable expertise in EV technology, smart factory automation and digital technologies, Workhorse is primed to build on our early leadership position as the only last-mile EV distributor selling vehicles for commercial use across the country. In addition, we believe Hitachi can help the Company drive customer orders as a well-known and respected player in the commercial leasing and finance industry, and we are looking forward to benefiting from their expertise.”
“We are excited to partner with Workhorse to help accelerate the roll out of their EV solutions and meet growing customer demand in North America,” said Hicham Abdessamad, Chief Executive, Hitachi Global Social Innovation Business and Chairman, Hitachi America, Ltd. “Hitachi is uniquely positioned in the growing commercial EV market with a set of innovative technologies and solutions to enable production capacity at scale, a reliable charging network infrastructure and a digital platform for intelligent vehicle routing and energy optimisation. The Workhorse partnership is a strong testament to Hitachi’s longterm commitment to Social Innovation.”
Kirk Mann, SVP & GM, Transportation Finance at Hitachi Capital America, added: “We are pleased to enter into this multi-year strategic commitment to support increasing Workhorse’s channel capacity. We will provide the financial and distribution expertise to bring Workhorse’s C-Series delivery vehicles to end-users.”
About Workhorse Group Inc.
Workhorse is a technology company focused on providing drone-integrated electric vehicles to the last-mile delivery sector. As an American original equipment manufacturer, it designs and builds high performance, battery-electric vehicles including trucks and aircraft. Workhorse also develops cloud-based, real-time telematics performance monitoring systems that are fully integrated with its vehicles and enable fleet operators to optimise energy and route efficiency. All Workhorse vehicles are designed to make the movement of people and goods more efficient and less harmful to the environment.
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The goal is to provide soldiers with an unmanned system that can fit in a backpack and serve as eyes and ears in areas too dangerous for troops to physically enter, such as suspicious buildings or a turn in the road ahead. Delivering such capability requires an autonomy architecture and software package that can enable a UAS to do more than ever before. Draper is not alone in developing UASs for the next battlefield and it welcomes new developments from the community. The common goal is to enable soldiers to proceed with greater certainty and capability in ever-changing operational environments.
Draper is working with the US Department of Defence under a three-year contract to address these challenges and improve UASs by focusing on the most challenging aspects of autonomous navigation. In a series of recent demonstrations, a team from Draper and the DoD customer tackled technical issues related to reducing collisions, enhancing onboard intelligence and developing new robust navigation methods.
The demonstration showed that a small handheld UAS could navigate narrow interiors in urban and indoor GPS-denied environments, create 3D maps of these environments, identify and avoid objects and return autonomously to the base.
Whilst others have worked in this area, Draper’s approach uses highly-optimised autonomy software capable of running on a cell phone-size embedded processor whilst using a single camera as the main sensor, thus maintaining an overall low size, weight and power. The new generation of small UASs needs to be able to fly independently and plan an obstacle-free route in real-time without any prior knowledge of the environment. They should be capable of closed-loop and fully autonomous flight, but until now that goal has been out of reach for many small UASs.
Gian Luca Mariottini, a colleague of mine at Draper, points out another requirement for the next generation of military drones is to reduce the cognitive load of the operator. With a fully autonomous UAV, the operator can focus on higher value tasks, such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Our view is that unmanned systems should not require the full attention of a soldier or pilot for them to be effective, which is where autonomy can help to offload some of this burden.
Toward that end, Draper has designed a user interface to provide a soldier with up-to-date information about the environment and the type of objects of interest observed during the UAS flight, as well as information about the UAS’s operational status.
Mariottini, an expert in unmanned aerial and ground systems, is already working toward more advanced autonomous capabilities for UASs to enable robust navigation at night in more diverse operating environments.
Draper is adding new features to its autonomy system, including new onboard artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for inferring depth distance for each pixel in an image and enabling operations in more complex environments.
Longer term, Draper wants to enable autonomous adaptive exploration of large environments, possibly for groups of cooperating drones. With these and other advances in micro-, mini- and small-UASs, one thing is becoming clear, the next battlefield will rely on unmanned systems like never before.