Category: news

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Will we lose our spatial orientation in the future?

The “Tag der Geomatik” is the GISDay of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) and ETH Zurich and gives insight into the versatility of the field of geoinformatics and surveying.

This year’s event took place as part of the “200yrs Swiss Geo X” events at the Culture and Convention Centre in Aarau and was held under the motto: how is our habitat recorded, what do we learn from the spatial data obtained and how do these data enable the sustainable design of our future habitat.

Our MIE-Lab module addressed the question whether we will lose spatial orientation in the future if we completely outsource navigation to a computer system and give up personal perception of space. This module with the ETH-App OMLETH took place outside in the old town of Aarau and provided GPS-based  tricky exercises for spatial perception and orientation.  Back in the congress centre the results were evaluated in classes, visualised (see the collection of six classes by 5 groups each) and discussed with the participants. A great event with a glittering feedback wall in the thumbs-up area.

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Analysis of GPS-tracking for the evaluation of sports activities – Luca Gaia starts his Bachelor thesis

Orienteering as a competitive sport is shaped by local strategies and decisions. Since the beginning of the availability of GPS, movement data of professional orienteering events have been recorded and mostly visually analyzed.
However, there is still few work that focuses on the quantitative analysis of the influence of context data such as terrain type, weather conditions, or elevation, on a runner’s performance in a professional setting. Apart from the influence of context data on the runner’s performance Luca will also quantitatively investigate the effect of the environment (e.g. the terrain, especially vegetation and landmarks) on orientation mistakes.

The bachelor thesis will last until the end of the spring semester 2019.

 

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Best Poster Nomination at the 4th SCCER Mobility Conference

The poster “Extracting Eco-Feedback from Movement Trajectories“, which we presented in collaboration with our colleagues from SUPSI, was nominated for the Best Poster Award at the 4th annual SCCER Mobility Conference in Zurich, Switzerland.

Over 120 participants from research and industry attended the conference and discussed relevant research topics and projects from the transport and mobility domain. Andreas Lischke (DLR Berlin) and Michael Frambourg (Volkswagen AG) held keynotes on the future of heavy-duty freight transport as well as future plans towards more sustainable passenger cars.

Both speakers emphasized the importance of an (economic and scientific) investement in alternative fuels next to pushing battery technologies forward. This point was later again highlighted, within the context of the rising shares of CO2 emissions from flight travels. With respect to Switzerland, three key topics were discussed in particular: 1) the logistics challenge, 2) passenger mobility in cities and regions, and 3) energy for transportation.

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Using Locally Produced Photovoltaic Energy to Charge Electric Vehicles

As more and more countries announce their plans for banning combustion engines (e.g., [1, 2]), it becomes critical to find ecologically sustainable ways to power electric vehicles. While wind and water provide energy throughout the whole day, photovoltaic installations have production peaks around midday which need to captured either by smart appliances (such as washing machines) or by some form of energy storage, such as batteries or water reservoirs. A solution for both problems could be to use the car batteries to cap the solar production peaks – possibly even completely locally, i.e., without requiring transmission lines to transport energy over large distances.

Our paper Using Locally Produced Photovoltaic Energy to Charge Electric Vehicles [3] (to be published in Computer Science – Research and Development and presented at D-A-CH+ Energieinformatik 2017) discusses this potential of using solar energy to power electric cars of commuters in Switzerland. On the one hand, we compute the potentially available solar energy on rooftops in each municipality:

This is put in relation to the energy required by all work commuting travels, both within municipalities, as well as between different ones. The routes traveled are given as follows:

In a first scenario, we assume that people only charge their electric cars during the day at their workplace. We find that without shifting power from one municipality to another it is possible to cover up to 89% of the energy demand of commuter mobility. This also means that in larger cities (which have a high photovoltaic potential due to many rooftops), energy production peaks can be captured by electric cars, without the need to deploy additional batteries or storage capacity. The following figure shows the energy balance in July:

In a second scenario, where people only charge their cars at home (usually during the night), solar energy could cover 99.95% of the commuter energy demand. However, this requires installed storage capacity of around 9.32 GWh to shift the energy from day to night. Currently, 13.5 kWh batteries are targeted at homeowners, which means that around 690’000 households in Switzerland would need to be equipped with such a battery to let people charge their cars at home during the night.

The above presented analyses consider a full coverage of rooftops with solar panels, as well as a complete replacement of combustion engine cars with electric cars. This shift will not happen instantaneously, so the values should be taken solely as indications of potential future energy balances. It also needs to be noted that leisure travel and freight transport make up a substantial amount of mobility, which is not represented in above numbers. For more details, seasonal influence on solar energy production, and scenarios where people charge cars both at home and at work, please refer to the paper.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/06/france-ban-petrol-diesel-cars-2040-emmanuel-macron-volvo
[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/norway-to-ban-the-sale-of-all-fossil-fuel-based-cars-by-2025-and-replace-with-electric-vehicles-a7065616.html
[3] https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/173513