The Houska Prize 2021 is considered the largest private research prize in Austria – with a total endowment of 500,000 Euros, the Houska Prize is the largest private prize for application-oriented research and is awarded annually by the B&C Private Foundation for outstanding research achievements. This year, VIRTUAL VEHICLE is nominated with the project “Mobile Test Platform SPIDER”! In the category “Research & Development in SMEs”, the mobile test robot is competing with four other top-class submissions. Prior to this, the expert panels nominated the best five projects from a total of 61 submissions in a two-stage process. The winning projects will be selected by a team of experts, and from 30 August 2021, the nominated research teams will face a public public evaluation by means of online voting for third place.

SPIDER closes the gap in established test platforms of the automotive industry between the hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) test bench and the real test vehicle. SPIDER offers the high efficiency and reproducibility of the HiL test bench without its limitations due to the sensor data simulation. The modular design and the flexible movement options of the SPIDER allow to simulate the behaviour of the entire vehicle identically and to carry out a large part of the tests using the SPIDER test platform. By the way, the SPIDER Challenge, for which you can register here, is still running until 28 July.