Northvolt is deploying artificial intelligence to get ahead in the race for new electric-vehicle battery technologies.
Siddharth Khullar, a former AI researcher at Apple, has assembled a team of machine learning experts at Northvolt to accelerate the Swedish battery maker’s development and manufacturing processes. The work may help double the amount of testing the company can do in some areas.
At Northvolt’s main factory in Skellefteå, just below the Arctic circle, the experts have helped implement machine learning and AI-driven sensors and software to bolster production and testing. They’re currently probing how AI can be used to speed up research and development at the Northvolt Labs facility in Västerås.
"We think in some areas we would be able to save up to 50 percent of latency,” Khullar said in an interview. “That would mean being able to do twice the number of experiments with the same number of people.”
Battery makers are racing to commercialize next-generation technologies to power EVs more cheaply and efficiently. AI could open the door to new areas of battery chemistry and design. While machine learning remains a relatively uncharted territory in battery research, the industry’s data-heaviness and complexity makes it a good match.
The experts are currently applying AI in everything from chemistry and cell design to manufacturing. They have recently started working on how machine learning can replace manual inspections. Northvolt’s main factory alone has some 4,000 inspection points, Khullar said.
“AI is about returning time to our people, so they can do more,” the researcher said, adding that battery making yields so much data that it couldn’t be handled by human workers alone.
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Northvolt — Europe’s only major homegrown battery maker — is expanding production in Sweden and has plans to build factories in Germany and Canada. It has so far raised more than $9 billion in equity and debt, bolstered by more than $55 billion in orders from automotive clients including BMW, Volvo Car, Polestar and Volkswagen.
During his more than six years at Apple, Khullar worked on features for the Apple Watch and research projects related to sleep tracking and autonomous driving. Since he joined Northvolt a little over a year ago, his team has grown to 18 people and is still hiring.
“AI wont be able to replace 10 years of working on a specific process in the line,” Khullar said. “But we can assist them with a lot of knowledge search, summarization, preparation of content, analyzing a ton of numbers and showing them patterns and making better decisions.”
