From lab to ice sheet: how TNO accelerates battery innovation with Team Polar

Team Polar: Antarctica as the ultimate stress test for battery innovation

Team Polar, consisting of students from TU Eindhoven, is developing a self-driving vehicle to make research in Antarctica more sustainable, affordable, and efficient. TNO supports the team by sharing facilities and providing expert guidance.

The autonomous vehicle must be able to run on sustainable energy: solar panels and batteries. Both play a crucial role, but each has limitations. It is about finding the right balance.

Why is Antarctica relevant for batteries? Because Antarctica amplifies the preconditions we increasingly encounter in electrification: cold, limited energy input, autonomy, and reliability. In that environment, any overly optimistic assumption “fails” mercilessly, making it a perfect testing ground to learn what is truly needed.

Generating and storing energy in a world of -40°C

Team Polar’s ​​first vehicle had to withstand rough terrain, drive autonomously, and generate and store its own energy, using, among other things, solar panels that repel ice and snow. Crucially, the system also requires batteries that are heated so that the rover can cover sufficient distances in the icy landscape, even when there is little or no sunlight.

This touches upon a core issue in battery practice: at low temperatures, power, charge acceptance, and usable capacity decrease, while internal resistance and risks regarding plating or adverse reactions actually increase. Team Polar addresses this not with “a better cell,” but with systems thinking: energy management, thermal management, and operational strategy.

Gentoo: 1,000 km in Antarctica

Team Polar’s ​​second vehicle is Gentoo, named after an Antarctic penguin species. The autonomous vehicle weighs 300 kilograms, carries six square meters of solar panels, and is designed to operate autonomously 24/7 at temperatures of -40 degrees. Moreover, it will cover 1,000 kilometers across Antarctica. That figure is significant for battery systems: it implies not only sufficient energy but, above all, predictability.

In remote areas, “marginal degradation” quickly becomes “mission failure.” The combination of solar energy, storage, and thermal management makes the energy balance dynamic. Consequently, it requires battery management that anticipates conditions, not just a standard driving cycle. Both technologies were first tested in the Netherlands and subsequently put to the test in Sweden.

TNO as ‘enabler’: expertise and infrastructure

TNO explicitly supports Team Polar with knowledge regarding autonomous driving, solar panels, and batteries for vehicles. At least as important: the team can make use of TNO facilities such as climate chambers with extreme temperatures reaching far below zero.

This is where the bridge between TNO’s battery management portfolio and practice becomes visible: a rover that must function autonomously in extreme cold requires State of Control (SoX), Lifecycle Insight (RUL), and thermally controlled operation, precisely the building blocks TNO is working on.

Learnings for the battery sector

The value of Team Polar for the battery sector does not lie in the fact that everyone will build a polar rover tomorrow. It lies in the tightening of requirements that are also emerging in heavy-duty mobility, off-grid applications, and autonomous machines: less predictable load profiles, stricter availability requirements, and greater reliance on software optimisation.

TNO’s approach, physics-based modeling, SoX/RUL, integration into Battery Management Systems, and validation via PoC—shows how to manage that complexity without relying solely on “the next cell chemistry.” At the same time, Team Polar demonstrates why this is necessary: ​​when energy input is limited (sun), the environment is extreme (cold), and failure is not an option, battery management becomes not a nice-to-have but a strategic core competency.