Joint Project KIsSME

Key account and start-up are part of a research project on highly automated vehicles

When industry, start-ups and research come together, it is not uncommon for disruptive innovations to emerge. RWTH Innovation helps to identify and coordinate the right contacts as well as specific cooperation and research projects at RWTH Aachen University. A central goal of our key account partnerships is to bring together successful industrial companies and innovative start-ups in order to work together on solutions for future-relevant issues. This is exactly what happened in the case of RA Consulting and Mindmotiv.

RA-Consulting GmbH has been a key account partner of RWTH Innovation since 2019. As part of this cooperation, the company came into contact with the start-up Mindmotiv, which was founded in 2019 as a spin-off of RWTH Aachen University. Together, RA Consulting and Mindmotiv are now part of a pioneering joint project of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology to optimise the testing of highly automated vehicles.

Highly automated vehicles are the future of mobility. The safety of the vehicles is the top priority. For this to be guaranteed, extensive tests are indispensable. A large number of sensors are used in the development, testing and operation of highly automated vehicles to produce large amounts of data, on the basis of which reliable driving decisions must be made in the shortest possible time. The efficient handling of this data is crucial here.

The goal of the new project KIsSME (short for " Künstliche Intelligenz zur selektiven echtzeitnahen Aufnahme von Szenarien- und Manöverdaten bei der Erprobung von Hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen", engl. "Artificial Intelligence for the Selective Near-Real-time Acquisition of Scenario and Manoeuvre Data in the Testing of Highly Automated Vehicles") is therefore to reduce these data volumes in order to save storage space, energy and evaluation effort, but at the same time to condense and use the information in such a way that the vehicles can be made safer. Adaptive algorithms that select the data based on AI and assign them to so-called "scenario catalogues" are supposed to help accomplish this. By using AI-based algorithms, the aim is to ensure that only data that actually adds value is recorded during driving.

The project idea came from RA Consulting GmbH. After the consortium was put together and the application was successfully submitted, AVL Deutschland GmbH took over the project coordination. In addition to Mindmotiv GmbH, the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, Ernst-Mach-Institut, the FZI Research Center for Information Technology, LiangDao GmbH, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Robert Bosch GmbH are involved as partners. Associated partners are ASAM e.V., Association for Standardization of Automation and Measuring Systems, and the cluster Electric Mobility South-West, coordinated by e-mobil BW GmbH, State Agency for New Mobility Solutions and Automotive Baden-Württemberg. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) is funding the project with a total of 6.5 million euros. KIsSME started at the beginning of 2021 and is scheduled to run for three years.

About RA Consulting

RA Consulting is located in a specially designed technology village in Bruchsal. The software company specialises in automotive electronics engineering and develops software tools and SW components for diagnosis, measurement and calibration of electronic systems. RA Consulting creates individual software solutions in the industrial sector, especially for databases, embedded systems and telematics applications, and serves a large number of customers in its field, such as OEMs in Germany and abroad. In addition to product development, research and development plays a major role for RA Consulting. Thus, as an industrial partner, it is currently involved in several research projects in the field of autonomous driving.

About Mindmotiv

The start-up offers its customers from the automotive, aerospace and automation industries the world's first cloud solution for optimising quality assurance in the development of modern embedded systems, such as those used in autonomous driving. With the universally applicable signal processing technology developed by Mindmotiv, highly complex software development and testing processes based on globally distributed resources and teams can be sustainably simplified, qualitatively improved, accelerated and automated in the cloud.

More information about the project here.