The FLOYD project, a CMU Portugal Large Scale Collaborative initiative, hosted a final Workshop on June 22nd at Altice Labs HQ in Aveiro and online. The event brought together members of the consortia and a diverse audience for a discussion on connected mobility and the integration of autonomous driving in our society.
The R&I project, led by Capgemini Engineering, aims to build a technological stack for offering high-performance network/computation services to vehicular users. The project has worked on improving mobility services and accelerating the integration of autonomous driving in society by advancing the networking and computation technological basis on which complex mobility and autonomy services and functionalities can be built. These include uninterrupted and seamless connectivity in diverse environments, leveraging edge and cloud computing, measuring network quality, control and prediction mechanisms, orchestration, security, and integration in various application use cases.
Funded through PT2020 and FCT under the CMU Portugal Program, the FLOYD – 5G/SDN Intelligent Systems For LOw latencY V2X communications in cross-Domain mobility applications initiative is led by Capgemini Engineering in collaboration with ALTICE LABS, S.A. , Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Instituto de Telecomunicações, VORTEX Colab and the Computer Science Department at CMU.
Through the collaboration between all these R&I industrial and academic entities, FLOYD has enabled the development, validation, and exploitation of various components and technologies, addressing multiple unanswered interrogations between vehicular and network communications.
“The collaboration between the different partners was extremely important, and each played its part. Capgemini was highly focused in the collection and analysis of 5G data, to make predictions to improve network performance and also with Edge Cloud concepts. Altice Labs made contributions to support the platoons between public and private 5G networks. Cister contributed with the use of Applications to assist the autonomous platoons and communications to 5G radio access points, IT for Wifi edge offloading and Multipath concept, Vortex in the security of the communications between the platoon members and CMU as deep app know-how.”, explains João Silva, Capgemini Engineering.
According to the project PI at CMU, Peter Steenkiste, Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering, “The FLOYD project was a great opportunity for both students and faculty in the CMU Portugal Program to work with industry research at Altice Labs and Capgemini Engineering. The collaboration provided valuable insights into important challenges in using 5G technology for connected mobility. This led to interesting and relevant research projects in areas such as analyzing the latency of 5G communication, energy efficiency, and the overhead of the 5G control plane.”
Artificial Intelligence has been combined with breakthrough technologies in edge computing and 5G, which allowed the development of a framework of tools for networking and communications to support platooning applications. Platooning is an application where a group of vehicles moves one after another in proximity, acting jointly as a single physical system. The scope of platooning is to improve safety, reduce fuel consumption, and increase road use efficiency.
“It was a truly enriching experience to have the invaluable support and expertise of Carnegie Mellon University as well as the partners and entities involved in the challenging Floyd project. Through all the hard work and collective work, it was possible to make significant and promising advances in supporting autonomous driving in platoons, exploring topics such as 5G infrastructure, ‘Edge Cloud,’ or Artificial Intelligence. I hope that these important contributions and collaborations with CMU will serve as a basis for establishing promising partnerships in the future.”, adds João Silva, Capgemini Engineering.
In addition to disclosing the project’s outcomes, the workshop also featured presentations from other projects addressing related topics such as Route 25, 5G-Auto, InSecTT, and STEROID.
Project FLOYD (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-045912) is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Operational Program for Competitiveness and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020) and by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the CMU Portugal Program.
You can learn more on the project’s website and through the video below.
