I worked on this project as part of the "Design for extreme affordability" class at Stanford. The class pairs students with companies doing social good work at underdeveloped countries.
My group was paired with Ampersand, a company that brought electric motorcycles to Rwanda to improve the profits from moto-taxi drivers. The technology provided an alternative to the exorbitant fuel costs they faced.
Ampersand used a battery swap system to guarantee that users can drive all day without needing to wait to recharge. However, it was not obvious where they should place battery swap stations or how to make the process as easy as possible. The batteries were also very heavy to handle.
Minimize the time drivers spent looking for battery swap stations and minimize the time spent in the battery swap stations.
My team developed a solution that optimized the number of charging stations in Kigali. In addition, we also proposed a new cart to help with swapping the batteries which significantly reduced the operation time and reduced operator strain.
Our team started by analyzing the battery swap stations infrastructure.
We used a systems modeling tool to understand and improve the battery locations and supplies. The system took into consideration the types of battery chargers, number of batteries available, number of lanes for battery swap, and number of stations.
The results were unexpected. Since Ampersand had a limited amount of money to build stations and batteries, it was most effective to have only one station in Kigali that was always well stocked. This would create a reliable system to drivers, who could always go to that station and have a battery ready for them.
We traveled to Kigali, interviewed users, and analyzed the battery swap stations. We saw that Ampersand was using a cart to move the batteries around, but it had ergonomic issues and the operations needed to align and swap batteries were not optimized. It was a bottleneck.
Once we returned, the team created a few cart and station prototypes to test the best solutions for the problem.
We modeled the carts to be more ergonomic and easy to maneuver. We followed up with timed tests with and without weights to simulate the battery.
In the end, we delivered a cart that was ergonomic and easy to use, and a report of how to best organize and locate the battery swap stations.
