EURIPIDES²

Project reference:  17-0803 VLC4AS

 

The aim of this projectentitled Visible Light Communication for the Automotive Sector is innovating a technological solution for vehicle-to- vehicle communication. The innovation will be based on the Visible Light Communication (VLC) systems, a wireless optical communication technology which makes use of the Solid State Lighting devices, more commonly known as LED lamps for data transfer. These LED bulbs are being used in numerous scenarios such as home and street lighting, ornamental and artistic works or the most important for this project, in the vehicle illumination devices (head lamps, rear lamps, signaling etc.).

VLC technology has been widely developed in the scientific and regulatory fields as shown the different standards such as JEITA or IEEE 802.15.7 and is considered a KET (key enabling technologies) by EU in its H2020 program. However, its commercial applications are still incipient and new developments and proposals are needed. This is the main aim of this project, to contribute to the integration of this kind of systems in the automotive sector.

Consortium partners of the project, OTOKAR, FARBA and Lightbee, are joining forces to build on previous work related to VLC applications and illuminating systems, internationally recognized novelty and prototyped ideas whose patenting is in progress. The established synergy further consolidated by the involvement of research organizations from Turkey and Spain is spreading beyond the pure technological development to cover Europe- and world-wide dissemination and exploitation activities and in the project’s follow-up commercialization.

The R&D tasks that are the focus of the project cover electronics related to the emitter and receiver, as well as a wide range of LED modules. Along with the hardware activities there is a limited workload in software development for the vehicle-to- vehicle VLC.

The VLC4AS end output has 4 major innovative advantages:

  1. Security: data are sent contained within the light, in a directive way to the receiver
  2. Immune: not affected by radiofrequencies, not generating anyone
  3. Cheap: photonics hardware is a low cost technology in front of radiofrequencies technologies
  4. Ubiquity: any led light source can be modulated for transmitting data.

Major components for collaborative R&D in this joint project:

 

Information available in the EURIPIDES SAB Strategic Research Agenda (available on
www.euripides-eureka.eu/calls)