tHErmaL vIsion AUgmented awarenesS

An extended perception for enabling safe autonomous driving

Discover

The project

With the emergence of new forms of personal mobility, the automotive industry is facing a drastic change. Photonic technology – one of the six Key Enabling Technology (KET) recognized by the European Commission – plays a crucial role in meeting automotive needs and expectations. With all sensors combined, limitations are still expected and will limit availability of assistance or autonomous vehicle.

Taking benefit of Long Wave Infra-Red bandwidth (LWIR) in which all object radiates energy depending only on its structure and temperature, the project aims to deliver breakthrough perception systems.  This project will develop smart thermal perception systems that will detect Long Wave Infra-Red light both for in-cabin passengers monitoring and for the car surrounding.  It will improve object classification of the automotive sensor suite in all light conditions, provide redundancy and thus extend vehicle autonomy towards level 3 and beyond, operating 24/7.

FUNDING AUTHORITIES

This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826131. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and France, Germany, Ireland, Italy. Completed by local funding from the French region Auvergne Rhône Alpes.

 

     

     

Objectives

1 Low cost, high performance

To develop cutting-edge and cost effective technologies leading to low cost, high performance LWIR module.

2 In-cabin, out-of cabin

To specify, develop, test and validate the thermal perception systems for in-cabin and out-of cabin application.

3 Valuable addition

To quantify the valuable addition of the thermal sensing into the current systems and future systems.

4 For vehicles and mobility

To promote the benefit of such systems in the future of autonomous vehicles and for smart mobility.

Impact

The EU aims at a 50% reduction in the number of people seriously injured on the roads between 2015 and 2025. This project will contribute to these objectives by providing an affordable and valuable thermal-based perception system to the ADAS system. The project could be leveraged on other highly-automated systems like the industry, robotic, IoT or Health.
The major concrete expected impact items of the project are as follows:

Technological impact items expected from technologies WPs developments (from WP3 to WP5)

Innovative IR modules and Smart IR modules expected from WP6

Applicative impact items expected from in-cabin (WP7) and car environment perception (WP8) developments and evaluations

Key figures

Equivalent of 28.2M€ R&D efforts with 8.2M€ EU funding
Duration: 41 months, kick off March 2019

Structure

The project consists of 8 work packages (WP) that are categorized as follows

Consortium

The project is run by a consortium of 11 complementary partners coordinated by LYNRED.

consortium