Innovation Demonstration for Market Uptake

Fostering scientific exchange, examining new software and hardware functions, improving the innovation capabilities of small business: These are only a few of the many motivations of VIRTUAL VEHICLE’s “Living Innovation Lab”. As a centre for interaction, the overall goal is to unleash cross-discipline synergy effects as well as to build and extend leading-edge technology platforms.

Validated simulation models are now seen as a prerequisite for efficient system design. For small businesses, however, the technologies and large sets of measurement data required are typically not available due to the significant managerial and contractual efforts involved. In particular, research organizations, SMEs and mid-caps face this problem. They have very limited access to industrial standards, platforms and tools, which has a negative influence on their research and innovation possibilities in general.
Furthermore, modern technologies, such as autonomous, self-adapting and safety-critical systems, need to be evaluated during development within real scenarios using real-world data. This requires suitable proving grounds for real-life experimentation. In particular, human-centric design aspects will dominate upcoming research with respect to safety and product individualization and will require an appropriate R&D infrastructure for dedicated Human-in-the-Loop investigations.
These challenging circumstances in the development sector, as well as the desire to transfer precious knowledge from academia to industry, led the VIRTUAL VEHICLE Research Center to found its “Living Innovation Lab”.

Unleashing cross-discipline synergy effects

Within its Living Innovation Lab, VIRTUAL VEHICLE develops highly innovative technologies for demonstration purposes that cover Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) 3 to 7. By serving as a centre for interaction, the lab focuses on unleashing cross-discipline synergy effects and generating innovations to build and extend leading-edge technology platforms. The resulting R&D infrastructure will then be made available for demonstrations during the acquisition process and follow-up R&D activities.

The goals of VIRTUAL VEHICLE’s Living Innovation Lab are:

• to strengthen the knowledge transfer from academia to industry, thereby fostering scientific exchange and educational value
• to investigate innovations, platforms, software-functions and hardware for extending knowledge and identifying new research topics
• to improve innovation and development capacities for third parties, especially for SMEs and mid-caps.

VIRTUAL VEHICLE’s Living Innovation Lab includes among others:

• The Open Connected Test-bed for Human-centric Systems Design.
• An open vehicle platform in the form of a computer-controlled car, which can be used for various research projects in the field of automated driving.
• The driving simulator which allows bridging the gap betwen physical testing and simulation in automotive engineering.