FABulous will develop an industrial surface coating technology that exploits breakthroughs in multiphoton lithography and process modelling to manufacture high resolution 3D metasurfaces at a throughput viable for series production. These metasurfaces will be capable of manipulating light with unprecedented flexibility and will open the possibility of designing and manufacturing smaller, lighter, and more environmentally friendly products, through the replacement of bulky components and/or the chemical coatings currently used to enhance the efficiency and performance of optical products. The project will explore novel methods for rapid (>10cm2/min) micro-fabrication of high-resolution (smaller than 200nm) 3D structures, and the development of new production tools to optimise the design and integration of the metasurfaces into functional products. These innovations will then be scaled for commercial applications and integrated into an industrial platform with a quality assurance and control system, enabling the fabrication of 3D metasurfaces on a range of substrates with unprecedented productivity, resolution, flexibility, and reliability. The application of the technology and its potential to contribute to the design and manufacturing of more sustainable and circular European goods will also be demonstrated in a series of uses cases. The platform will be used to coat optical components (lenses, light pipes, and micro-optics arrays) with custom metasurfaces, and demonstrate that these components, when integrated into the design and manufacturing of functional optical systems (cameras, automotive lights and PV cells), can significantly improve their efficiency whilst in parallel reducing their environmental footprint.

SELFY will increase CCAM ecosystem’s safety, security, robustness, and resilience by researching and developing a toolbox made of collaborative tools which main pillars are: (i) situational awareness, through collaborative perception and monitoring; (ii) data sharing, advanced processing for detection of malicious events and decision-making; (iii) resilience, increased ability to adapt and respond to cyber-threats and cyber-attacks; and (iv) trust, including guarantees regarding privacy, confidentiality, integrity and immutability of data in a collaborative CCAM environment. SELFY tools can operate individually and/or cooperatively with other tools, generating a distributed global solution, where SELF-protection, SELF-response and SELF-recovery decisions will be managed locally or globally as appropriate for any given cyber-attack, malicious activity or hazard, extending the Operational Design Domain (ODD) In Europe, 50 million connected cars are expected in circulation by 2026, and EU regulations requires for cybersecurity certificates for vehicles. In this scenario, SELFY long term impact is grounded on a value proposition that is OEM and/or vendor agnostic, thus facilitating adoption at all stages of the value chain. Additionally, the consortium involves all necessary stakeholders for co-creating a sound and comprehensive CCAM solution: including OEMs, road operators, traffic and infrastructure management, researchers, and policy-makers. SELFY expected outcomes include 5 traffic and infrastructure management organizations adopting the SELFY toolbox, which will benefit of a >90% effectiveness rate in detection of vulnerable vehicles and security breaches and an increase of >75% off the mitigation rate at demonstrated in TRL6 by the end of the project.

While the deployment of connected automated vehicle (CAV) turns into reality, its acceptance has been called into question. Societal issues regarding public acceptance, user awareness and ethics, therefore, become priority concerns. The approach based on the technology push, jeopardizes social viability of innovative technology like CAV, as it creates a gap between the well-thought technical reliability and public acceptance. SUaaVE will solve this gap by leaning on a Human-Driven Design (HDD) approach, enhancing synergies social science, human factors research and automotive market by means of an iterative process of assessment, co-design and prototyping. Participatory process will involve above 4.000 users (passengers, traditional and future drivers, VRU) and 100 experts and stakeholders along the project. The main outcomes will be: (1) A new paradigm of automation: ALFRED -Automation Level Four+ Reliable Empathic Driver-, that will “colour the decision-making processes of the CAV with human emotions” with: (a) EMpathY Unit to understand the emotional and cognitive state of the passenger, while taking into account society ethical principles; and (b) an Adaptive, Cognitive and Emotional Interface with a set of services (vehicle dynamics, ambient and postural comfort) to enjoy the ride and enhance passenger experience. (2) An immersive Virtual Human Centred Design (V-HCD) platform, allowing the simulation of CAV focused on Human factors to assess their acceptance and speed up market deployment. (3) Guidelines to support Public Authorities, representing a breakthrough in the public acceptance of future CAVs for both the society and, in particular, for all road users. SUaaVE partners will exploit ALFRED and V-HCD platform. Moreover, SUaaVE will contribute to generate new business models based on: 1) exploitation of personal data where the user is the owner and decide how to exploit it, and 2) new adaptive services to user status in real time.

The digital transformation and the availability of more diverse and cost-effective methods for 3D capture has led to the creation of digitised representations of parts of our public spaces, machinery and processes, so-called Digital Twins. These Digital Twins are an important basis for building advanced XR applications for cityscapes and the industrial environments. These XR applications need high-fidelity models for accurate localization, which are kept in-sync with the real world. However, currently (i) creating high-fidelity Digital Twins is costly, (ii) integrating data from heterogeneous sensors is still challenging and (iii) the update of Digital Twins requires explicit manual intervention. The vision of DIDYMOS-XR is to enable advanced, more realistic and more dynamic extended reality (XR) applications, powered through artificial intelligence. The project thus focuses on advancing technologies for creating large-scale digital twins, synchronised with the real world. DIDYMOS-XR will research and develop methods for reconstruction and mapping from heterogeneous inputs, including static and mobile sensors, AI-based data fusion, scene understanding and rendering. Digtal twin based XR applications also require means of accurately positioning in the environment, aware of the dynamics of the scene, also addresed by the project. The capture of scenes at scale, as well as using cameras and other sensor data for synchronising the digital representation, bears the risk of capturing personal and sensitive data. Hence, the technologies resulting from DIDYMOS-XR must be and will be ethical and privacy-aware by design. In order to demonstrate and validate the enabling technologies researched and developed in DIDYMOS-XR, the project will address use cases of XR applications in two domains that differ in their scale and characteristics. One is urban planning and smart mobility, the other is the collaboration with autonomous mobile robots at an industrial production facility.

Facing to the challenge of future highly automated vehicles, where occupants can freely orient themselves to engage in non-driving activities. This new environment prompts questions about how car occupants will actually sit, what activities they will engage in, and how they will informed through the HMI to keep them in the loop if necessary. AWARE2ALL aims to pave the way towards Highly Automated Vehicles (HAVs) deployment in traffic, by effectively addressing the changes in road safety and changes in the interaction of different road users caused by the emergence of HAV through the development of innovative technologies along with the corresponding assessment tools and methodologies. AWARE2ALL will develop safety and HMI systems that will be interrelated through achieving a holistic understanding of the scene to ensure safe operation of the HAV. AWARE2ALL proposes a common conceptual universal safety framework for considering Human Machine Interaction (HMI). The project will be built on the results of projects funded under H2020 and other R&D programmes addressing the identification of new safety-critical situations and the most likely positions and postures considering the expected HAV applications. The main objective of AWARE2ALL is to address the new safety challenges posed by the introduction of HAVs in mixed road traffic, through the development of inclusive and innovative safety (passive and active) and HMI (interior and exterior) systems that will consider the variety of population and will objectively demonstrate relevant improvements in mixed traffic safety.