The research activities of the VehicularLab have been presented at the "Wissenwerte" Congress in Bremen, Germany. This event is the annual meeting point for scientific journalists of the german speaking area. This two day event included a conference where researchers and media specialists meet to discuss about new research areas that are of interest to the public.

With the Twizy we presented several projects related to sustainable mobility, including the Eco-Driving application for electromobility and driver and vehicle monitoring and profiling.

More information on the event can be found on their website. Photo: SnT/scienceRELATIONS.

On October 9th, Luxembourg popular magazine TELECRAN has edited a commemorative issue for the 10th birthday of the University. 

Among the research teams that have been presented in this issue, the VehicularLAB had the opportunity to show its activities, in particular the research that have been carried out in the field of driver and vehicle monitoring and profiling.

A full PDF version of the article is proposed here.

This year's edition of the Vehicular Communications and Applications workshop (VCA'13), co-organized by the VehicularLab, was successfully held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'13) in Göttingen, Germany. The event, started with a keynote presentation by Prof. Dr. Mario Gerla (UCLA) on cognitive spectrum management for vehicular communications followed by five selected presentations on diverse topics related to vehicular applications.

For more information on the event and the presented papers, please refer to the event website.

The VehicularLab together with the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) is organizing the 2nd GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch Inter-Vehicle Communication to be held in Luxembourg, February 20-21, 2014.

The goal of this event is to bring together talented young researchers to discuss recent advances and early results in the area of vehicular inter-networking technologies and related applications. This seminar will include and solicit contributions addressing technical and research issues, development projects, standardization activities, and field trials on VANET technologies and applications.

From the 21st to the 27th of July 2013 Lara Codecá, PhD Candidate at SnT, attended the SMART MOBILITY 2020 summer school and won the 2nd Best Poster Award with fAVoR: Advanced Vehicular Routing in urban environments.

The summer school has been organized by BMW R&D, EURECOM and the Technische Universität München (TUM) with the support of the Bayerisch-Französische Hochschulzentrum (BFHZ) and the Bureau de Coopération Universitaire de Munich (BCU). This event took place on the Isle of Frauenchiemsee, Germany. The topics included ICT for sustainable mobility, vehicular cloud computing, big data analysis, and multimodal mobility.

Dr. Pete Worden, Director of the AMES Research Center of NASA in California was visiting Luxembourg on August 1st and 2nd 2013 to discuss opportunities for cooperation between the NASA Research Center and public and private research actors in Luxembourg.

During his visit, Dr. Worden stopped at the Interdisciplinary Center of Security, Reliability & Trust of the University of Luxembourg, where he got an overview of the research activities of the different laboratories, including the VehicularLab. To showcase the EcoDriving application, Dr. Worden was invited to take a test drive with the Twizy eVehicle. With a final score of 80 (out of 100), Dr. Worden showed to be a very efficient driver!

A group of 35 students have visited SnT on July 24th in the context of the second Summer School organized by BGL-BNP Paribas. Dr. German Castignani and MSc. student Raoul Schmitz have presented the activities of the VehicularLab to the students, in particular those projects related to Electro-Mobility. The students had the opportunity to discover the world of electrical vehicules, their advantanges and challenges, and have been introduced into eco-driving concepts. 

As part of the visit, we have organized an eco-driving contest at the SnT parking in which the students used a scoring application developped by MSc. student Raoul Schmitz. This contest allowed the students to better understand the impact of driving habits on the electrical vehicles autonomy.

During a research visit at UCLA, second-year PhD student Markus Forster working on the FNR-funded MOVE project presented his current research on Highway Traffic Synchronization at the Green City Project Meeting. The VehicularLab participates as a non-contrating partner to the research activities explored in this NSF funded project.

Project Details:

The Green City project at UCLA and Rutgers explores traffic managment schemes that simultaneously reduce congestion, emissions and traveler delays. The pivotal element is the ability to close the loop between congestion/polluation and traffic control using vehicular communication technologies, intelligent traffic signals and smart navigators.

Battery autonomy is the main limitation of current Electrical Vehicles (EV). Extending the battery capacity remains the most important research challenge in the mid and long term, but impressive autonomy gains can be achieved if people drive eco-friendly. EV have the ability of recuperating high amounts of energy through Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS), that inject power to the batteries when the user brakes or moves without accelerating the engine. Then, drivers can take profit of this concept by intelligently adapting the way they drive and maximise energy recuperation.

To evaluate the eco-friendliness of drivers, the VehicularLab have developed an Android application that gathers real-time CAN-bus data (e.g., power, acceleration) and GPS parameters (e.g., speed, altitude) and evaluates the performance of the drivers using a Fuzzy Inference System FIS). This system combines the input and applies a set of energy-efficiency rules to provide a driver score.

The mobile application has been installed in an Android Tablet and mounted in a Renault Twizy EV. A connection to the CAN-bus was assured through a Bluetooth OBD adapter. FAE visitors were invited to drive into a small demonstration circuit for a couple of minutes. At the end of each trip, the driver was provided with an average score. The objective of this demonstration was twofold. First, it allowed us to test our platform in a real environment with different driving behaviours. Second, it allowed us to disseminate electro-mobility and eco-driving concepts to people of all ages to create a conscience on the energy-efficient usage of EV.