Delft Technical University’s (TU Delft) team were among the final three to compete in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Hyperloopcompetition on Sunday, July 22, in California.  With Cognizant as the team’s prime sponsor, executives joined the 37 students in leading the countdown to officially launch Delft’s Atlas 01 pod down the tube. The team had hopes of competing for the speed record during the event, aiming for 480 kilometers per hour (298 miles per hour), but instead was only able to hit 88 miles per hour during the competition. However, that was still good enough to place second at the SpaceX event.

“When TU Delft was selected as the first test run, the competition became intense,” said Karthik Krishnamurthy, Senior Vice President and Global Markets Head, Cognizant Digital Business. “It was impressive to observe in the final hour the team’s collaboration across their varying disciplines with agility, precision and persistence to ensure a fail-safe run.

“Being alongside the TU Delft team was an amazing experience as it allowed us to see how today’s future talent is building tomorrow’s innovations with a ‘meaningful purpose’ to the way we live and work. Our sponsorship of TU Delft has fostered foundational learnings that we plan to share in a continued effort to collaborate and define the future of transportation and the future of talent.”

Over the past year, TU Delft along with the support of Cognizant Digital Business’ Connected Products and AI & Analytics practices refined and conduct hundreds of safety and reliability model-based simulations of its Hyperloop pod. The pod passed numerous SpaceX tests and design reviews and was one of 20 teams selected to compete at SpaceX’s headquarters. After a week of testing, only three teams, including TU Delft, qualified to compete on the final test run. In addition to TU Delft, EPFLoop, a Swiss team, and WARR Hyperloop out of Germany, the winners of last year’s challenge, competed. WARR Hyperloop won first place in the 2018 competition.

What’s next for TU Delft? Delft has been working on a new collaboration project called Hyperloop Connect.  Hyperloop represents an exciting idea and a vast engineering challenge, one that will not be solved by any single team. 

For more information on the TU Delft team and the future of transportation:

Delft Hyperloop 

Cognizant’s Gajen Kandiah

Cognizant’s Manoj Mathew