Smart Engineering for Smart Mobility

The mobility and technology market is changing rapidly. Greater safety, added comfort and more service lead to a better quality of life while at the same placing increasingly complex demands on excellent engineering. The success of future-relevant mobility services depends on them being efficient, easy to use and environmentally friendly.

Carsten Rinka, Global Sales Director at IAV, says: “We not only supply smart powertrain concepts and powertrain technologies and master the entire range of vehicle development – right through to autonomous driving and complete vehicles. At CES in Las Vegas, we’re showing that we cover the entire mobility ecosystem, transcending technology and sector boundaries. Our services for comfortable mobility encompass smart navigation, voice control, air-conditioning and a connected Cargobike, and they make it clear that IAV is driving forward the development of future mobility in all its facets.”

IAV’s new navigation concept Smart Guide makes the search for the right route through unknown territory child’s play, without the driver having to take his/her eyes off the road and without voice announcements. The routing is projected on to the windscreen – for the driver, Augmented Reality makes it seem to lie directly on the road. This way, Smart Guide makes the often imprecise voice announcements familiar from traditional navigation systems and unclear signposts on a small display superfluous.

Even particularly complex junctions, roundabouts or multilane thoroughfares are overcome by Smart Guide with ease. The driver only needs to follow the relevant signs and arrives safely at the destination. That reduces stress, avoids abrupt lane changes and so also helps prevent accidents. In this way, IAV’s Smart Guide takes vehicle navigation to the next level of evolution.

Smart Speech brings IAV another step closer to the vision of a vehicle totally steered and controlled by speech. IAV’s smart speech assistant recognizes different people and reacts to each passenger individually, adequately and proactively – regardless of whether it is speaking, for instance, with the driver, her son or an unknown passenger. Individual assignment of rights and zone recognition enable the system to map the voices precisely.

For the assignment of rights, each person registers his/her voice once, creating individual profiles. These are granted different rights in the vehicle. In this way, for instance, it can be established that the navigation is only allowed to be operated by the adult passengers, but the entertainment systems can be operated by the children as well. Orders from unknown people can be totally ignored, which in future should also make vehicle theft more difficult.

In addition, the system can also allocate individual interests and preferences to the different people. It knows the children’s favorite music or can suggest certain restaurants as navigation destinations. Voice control can also be coupled with other applications and, for instance, send news to people from the address book, point to interesting news on the internet, or recognize product offerings on shopping portals, suggest them and directly place an order on request.

Whatever the weather: IAV’s AI-based climate control always keeps the climate pleasant in the passenger compartment on hot summer days or in autumnal rain. The smart climate control knows every passenger’s level of comfort and autonomously adjusts the vehicle air-conditioning accordingly. For this, the users set their personal temperature preferences once. The climate control stores these personalized settings and matches them with the ambient temperature. After a short learning phase, no further interventions in the climate control are necessary, and the air conditioning in the passenger compartment is always set to give the vehicle occupants maximum comfort.

For the individualized comfort, we need smart and self-learning algorithms in the vehicle that gather many different data and physical states and can evaluate them using artificial intelligence. IAV’s climate control recognizes the correlation between the thermal boundary conditions and the driver’s actual comfort with a high degree of reliability, thus ensuring individualized wellbeing.

Many major cities are confronted with the challenges of urbanization, the densification of built-up areas and the constantly growing number of road users. With a view to reconciling high traffic density and limited space for transport infrastructure, IAV is developing connected services that can be combined like modules to form a comprehensive mobility platform. With its smart Cargobike, IAV demonstrates a tailored solution for transport in the (sub)urban space.

The connected services portfolio relating to the Cargobike supports the entire logistics chain. The fleet management with scheduling and route optimization can be just as well integrated as the securing of the goods being delivered. During the delivery, couriers benefit from the camera-based follow-me function. Once it is trained, the courier does not have to mount the bike or push it for every short distance. The vehicle recognizes the courier autonomously and follows him/her automatically in walking speed. In addition, the courier does not need to worry about securing the cargo. It is stored in a spacious transport box, which can only be opened when the courier is in the immediate vicinity. So the transported goods are always secure.

As an end-to-end application, the Cargobike platform has a frontend application in the form of a smartphone app, which allows the courier to look at his/her individual route and relevant vehicle information. It also has a backend server, in which every process is calculated and stored.

Whether it is for a carsharing provider, a logistics company or fleet management – the smart and manageable DiSA (Digital Service Assistant) dashboard makes fleet management very easy. With the help of the online service, every vehicle from bicycle to truck and their key operating and maintenance parameters can be viewed and evaluated – any time, anywhere. If a limit value such as low tire pressure is identified, the system automatically informs the driver and fleet operator, so the remedial action can be taken. If it is a serious problem, the direct booking of a service appointment is also possible.

The Cargobike platform can also be used for scheduling. The route and deployment planning can use resources and personnel in a time-saving, cost-efficient way. This optimization function is based on a smart algorithm, which clusters the orders and distributes them to the right vehicle types and routes by scope and preferred appointment.

CES is held in Las Vegas from January 7 to 10, 2020. IAV can be found at booth 821 in the Westgate Paradise Center (Tech East). For more information on IAV’s appearance at CES 2020 go to: www.iav.com/en/ces.

Employing more than 8,000 members of staff, IAV is one of the world’s leading engineering partners to the automotive industry. The company has been developing innovative concepts and technologies for future vehicles for more than 35 years, generating turnover of around 900 million euros in 2018. The client base includes all renowned automotive manufacturers and suppliers worldwide. Besides vehicle and powertrain development, IAV has been involved in electromobility and autonomous driving from an early stage and is today one of the leading engineering providers in this fields. Together with the Development Centers in Berlin, Gifhorn and Chemnitz/Stollberg, IAV also has sites in Munich, Sindelfingen and Ingolstadt, as well as other European countries, Asia and also North and South America.