Made in Italy technologies from the Abruzzo innovation ecosystem
The automotive sector is the beating heart of the Abruzzo region with 8 billion in turnover, 23,000 employees and significant growth in terms of exports of around 48%. In Val di Sangro there are Stellantis Europe Spa Atessa, which has been producing the Ducato, the best-selling light commercial vehicle in Europe since 1981, and Honda Italia Industriale Spa, the only Honda manufacturing site in Europe for two-wheelers. In this area, many of the related companies are concentrated and the Automotive Innovation Hub is located, a network of small and medium-sized companies, universities and research centres. In Abruzzo there are also important industrial installations such as Leonardo, Telespazio, Thales Alenia Space and Elital which operate in a rapidly growing international context.
At the Automotive Innovation Forum – IAF organized by the Automotive Innovation Hub in collaboration with the Abruzzo Region and the Chieti Pescara Chamber of Commerce and with the participation of Adolfo Urso, Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy, Marco Marsilio president of the Abruzzo Region and Edoardo Alesse Rector of the University of L’Aquila were to present the excellence and the regional skills and production system.
In this context, the Workshop on Satellite Technologies for the Eco-sustainable and Safe Automation of Vehicles took place, bringing together representatives of road infrastructure managers, mobility service operators, the Italian and European Space Agency, industries, Universities and Research Centres. The Workshop represented an opportunity for Radiolabs to present the results of the innovation eco-system created in the Abruzzo Region to promote innovation and collaborations between the satellite and automotive domains present in the area. This initiative, unique in Italy, is consistent with the Smart Specialization Strategy S3 (2021-27) of the Abruzzo Region which includes Aerospace and Automotive in the areas of specialization characteristic of its territory. The S3 program promotes place-based innovation to enable sustainable and resilient economic development, to identify priorities and actions capable of maximizing the effects of investments in research and innovation, interregional collaboration and to connect regional innovation valleys in key thematic areas identified in the new European agenda.
The Abruzzo eco-system – born in 2018 with the signing of the Innovation Agreement with the then MISE (now MIMIT) has given rise to a Research-Industry partnership between Radiolabs, Leonardo, Telespazio, Elital and the University of Aquila present in the Region, allowing the launch of a multi-year plan to develop enabling technologies for the connected and autonomous driving of vehicles. Leading the way was the EMERGE project coordinated by Radiolabs in collaboration with FCA (the current STELLANTIS). The project, presented by Elena Cinque of Radiolabs, focuses on the cooperative driving of the Ducato vehicle for logistics transport and emergency management and has allowed the development of geo-localisation technologies, telecommunications systems based on terrestrial and satellite networks, cybersecurity techniques and new applications such as the artificial horizon and dynamic traffic management with Artificial Intelligence techniques. Three vehicles were set up as mobile laboratories and a MEC – Mobile Edge Computing node based on 5G was created in Abruzzo in collaboration with the Stellantis SCALA project, preparatory to future developments including the integration of 5G networks with constellations of low orbit satellites in order to achieve widespread coverage across the entire territory and a lower environmental impact.
The main objective of the Abruzzo eco-system is the new technologies for the connected and autonomous driving car for which satellite technologies are assuming growing importance and EMERGE, as underlined by Alessandro Neri, president of Radiolabs, has played a role of driving force to acquire a series of complementary research projects, worth approximately €15 million. These projects, largely financed at an international level, were carried out thanks to a public-private partnership and the contribution of the Italian Space Agency, creating important impacts on the territory. Like the Ex-EMERGE Center of Excellence, presented by Fortunato Santucci of the University of L’Aquila and Director of the Center, and the Radiolabs Laboratory, both located in the Abruzzo Technopole where an inter-disciplinary team of around 30 professors, researchers and engineers develop, design and test the geo-localization with very high precision and security, of telecommunications between vehicles and control centers as well as cybersecurity techniques focused on the future vehicle which must always be connected, geo-localized and resilient to cyber attacks. Particular attention is paid by the Ex-EMERGE Center of Excellence for specialist training which to date has allowed 15 students to obtain the Research Doctorate (PhD) in the new disciplines for which distinctive skills are needed.
The transition towards connected and autonomous driving also requires adequate tools for the validation and certification of technological systems to demonstrate the achievement of safety levels with the partial or total absence of the driver and in any operating scenario. This is a challenge that requires very high skills and can produce important economical returns as approximately 30% of the costs of the devices are dedicated to validation and certification. To seize this opportunity, the P-CAR project was born, assigned to Radiolabs by the European Space Agency and financed by the Italian Space Agency as part of the NAVSP-3 program. With P-CAR, declared Francesco Valentini of Radiolabs, we are creating, in collaboration with the University of L’Aquila and Intecs, the first Accredited European Center for the validation and certification of new technologies for the connected and autonomous car.
The Center will be able to reproduce in the laboratories all the environments in which the car must operate and at the same time simulate extreme scenarios (e.g. rain, snow, fog, rough road, etc.) in which the car could find itself travelling. The objective is to allow suppliers of equipment and cars to validate the performance of their products by minimizing the use of field tests which, in addition to requiring high costs and times, are not exhaustive in terms of safety. The Center located in L’Aquila was conceived with a cloud-based architecture to connect other laboratories and centers of excellence around the world, creating an interconnected and virtualized laboratory to offer services to users without geographical limits.
The Workshop on Satellite Technologies was opened by Domenico Crocco of ANAS, President of the Technical Committee for Autonomous Driving and new technologies for safety of PIARC Italia, who underlined the central role of new technologies in improving safety on the roads where every year 1.3 millions of people lose their lives in the world and a plan has been agreed to halve the number of deaths by 2030 and eliminate them completely by 2050. The Smart Road, added Crocco, thanks to artificial intelligence, already allows dialogue between infrastructures roads and drivers and to provide them with all traffic and safety information.
The interventions of the ASI are particularly relevant in order to outline a national strategy that promotes satellite technologies for the automotive sector. Giancarlo Varacalli – head of ASI’s Navigation and Telecommunications Unit – presented projects in the transport sector including a first Augmentation Network for automotive and rail applications and the development of advanced localization systems for connected and autonomous driving at Level 3 and superior. On the international front, Varacalli illustrated the role of ESA’s NAVISP-3 program which among others contributes to the creation of the P-CAR Center in Abruzzo. He also hoped that on the telecommunications front, Europe and Italy will pursue a plan involving the main players in the sector for the integration of satellite and terrestrial telecommunications technologies to support the evolution of the connected car.
Mauro Cardone – Head of are programs at ASI – underlined the central role of GNSS as the current source of absolute vehicle location together with high definition maps. But to face new challenges, such as the increase in precision and integrity levels for connected and autonomous driving, the new “fusion” technologies of GNSS data with those of other sensors, the RAIM Algorithms and the use of NRTK, PPP, RTK techniques are under development. Cardone also placed emphasis on artificial intelligence for the localization and mapping of objects along the road and the accurate and continuous detection of signs, essential for safely planning the route by emulating human behaviour.
On the chip front for GNSS, Ilaria Martini – Integrity Domain Leader Principal Research Engineer of U-Blox, a world leading company with 100 million chips and systems sold in 2023, gave a presentation. Martini underlined the importance of the automotive market on which the company is focused with the new generation of chips designed to satisfy the safe and accurate positioning of the autonomous vehicle targeting the requirements of Levels 3-5. Roberto Capua – Head of Innovation at Sogei – spoke on this topic as Chairman of the RTCM SC-134 Committee, an international non-profit organization that is defining the standards of new GNSS systems with high accuracy and integrity with a multimodal approach: automotive, railway and marine. The new standards, concluded Capua, will be proposed for approval to the Plenary Assembly at the beginning of 2025.
On the industrial side, speakers included Valerio di Claudio from Leonardo who presented the on-board units developed in the EMERGE project and Olivier TAHIR from the Safe Industries start-up who created a multi-sensor platform for local public transport. Matteo Lucchetti – Cyber 4.0 Operations Director – presented the initiatives and projects in the Automtive and Cyber Security fields.
The Workshop was concluded by Carola Di Paolo – Head of Commercial Management, Fleet Monitoring and Special Projects of the Società Unica Abruzzese di Trasporto (TUA) – which manages approximately 65% of road and rail services in Abruzzo, presenting the Digitalization experience in TUA and the implementation of an integrated solution for multimodal mobility within the MaaS Mobility as a Service for Italy program, becoming part of the Mission.
