How Australia’s Applied EV is Making Vehicles 'Robot-Ready' - CEO Julian Broadbent

Melbourne-based Applied EV is a company that is breaking all stereotypes and preconceived notions that people might have of autonomous mobility. Established back in 2015, Applied EV decided to direct its focus to building a vehicle that runs purely on software. It has built a control system that goes into vehicles, making them autonomous or robot-ready. 

Auto Futures recently caught up with CEO and Co-founder, Julian Broadbent,. 

“There are about 50 to 100 little black boxes in nearly every vehicle made today. It goes right back to the automotive model of automakers being really good assemblers, but relying on suppliers to provide them with the features that we would see in a vehicle, right from something important like Anti-lock Braking Systems (ABS), or simple stuff like operating a parking brake or a dome lamp," says Broadbent.

"Most people have a large amount of manual control, but on the electronics side, you've got all of these black boxes and they're all in a distributed system. How do you safety rate 50 black boxes from 50 different companies? You can't do it. That's where the challenge lies for roboticists. That’s where we come in." 

Applied EV takes all of the functionality of those black boxes and squeezes it into one giant central control unit.

"We've allowed up to a thousand inputs and outputs combined to deal with all the different things that happen in any vehicle, not just a passenger vehicle. You've got this really complex system that has been squished into a central control unit, where the actual primary interface between us and the autonomous driving unit is just vector and velocity just driving forward and turning, that's all it is,” he explains. 

Although Broadbent’s explanation makes it seem simple, in reality Applied EV’s technology is incredibly complex with a myriad of many different components. For example, there are many different layers of firmware and middleware, different electronics components, processes, connectors, but it is all developed in-house or brought to a single point and had it safety rated. 

While its foundation is software, it's also created a vehicle without a cabin. This makes the vehicle lighter and more energy efficient.

"By taking the driver, seats, air conditioning, airbags and all the things that make a cabin out of the vehicle, you are just focussed on carrying the payload and completing a job. The economics are tremendous. To this end, we created a product called the Blanc Robot, which will be manufactured by one of our partners. We're talking to a number of partners at the moment to do that, but bringing this product to market, we've been able to really add value to that core technology,” he says. 

Of the partners that Broadbent mentioned, one such partner happens to be Japanese chemical, pharmaceutical and IT giant, Teijin.

“Teijin is an expert in what it does. It makes electronics-friendly, safety rated material that can form into a specific shape. It happens to be extremely lightweight and very strong. We will continue to work with the company on different shapes for housing some of the electronic components. At the moment, we use its technology for an entire skateboard, which has all of our electronics in there including the batteries.”

Targeting the Logistics and Off-Road Spaces

Robo-taxis are the more popular interpretation of the application of autonomous technology, and Broadbent is certain that it is a direction that most auto companies would like to take, given that they have been moving people for decades now. However, Applied EV is more interested in the commercial applications of a fully autonomous vehicle with no cabin, especially in the area of on-road logistics like groceries, package delivery, garbage collection and the likes.

Given that a lot of urban centres in the world are low speed, it would be ideal for these Applied EV’s vehicles. 

According to Broadbent, there is yet another space that the company can immediately begin to target – the off-road space – that comprises activities like surveillance, or  technical works that involve using sensors mounted atop vehicles to do repetitive, boring and difficult jobs.

Examples of this could be carrying spare parts around a mine site or moving a 5G telecommunications tower. This space tends to face acute labour shortages, with serious safety challenges for those involved. By introducing autonomous technology to this space, Applied EV wouldn’t just be eliminating the problem of labour shortages, but would also be taking any risk to human health and welfare out of the equation.

"One of our primary goals is, with a vehicle like ours, to stop people from having to do dangerous or dirty jobs, or jobs they don't like. In terms of the future plans, we don't see any reason why our vehicle can't operate all around the world for some of those use cases where they might be easily repeated. There's absolutely no barriers to geography," he says.

Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Applied EV has announced partnerships with Oxbotica in the UK and Suzuki Motors in Japan. It also has several ongoing trials with partners that haven’t been announced yet. In January, 2023, the company’s all set to make a big splash by showcasing the Blanc robot vehicles at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. 

“We have a roadmap and a really big vision that we're trying to execute here and it's really motivating. We can see a lot of things that our company can do that can help people and address the labour shortage in the world," says Broadbent.

“There's so much we can do at the bottom of the pyramid. The market for a robo-taxi is huge, just like a normal passenger car. But there's so many other vehicles in our world other than ones for moving people and all those jobs that those vehicles do, we can do those. We like those jobs the most. I think they make sense in terms of the use of the technology at a given time."

"Maybe, one day, our technology could find itself in a vehicle of the future built by the big automakers, at a huge scale where people depend on it. That would be the ultimate,” he muses.