Smart Cars Day 23. 11. 2023

On Thursday, November 23rd, the Valeo R&D center in Prague opened to the public and welcomed enthusiasts of new technologies to the autumn edition of our Smart Cars Day event. We presented twelve practical demonstrations to students from technical universities and professionals from relevant industries.

The new buildings of the Prague development center were also included in the tour of this event, technologies ranging from already common to lesser known were presented. Visitors could see in practice the driving monitoring camera, trunk opening using ultrasound, the development of rain-light sensors, NCAP testing, which forms the basis for evaluating the safety of new cars, and last but not least, the work and development of our AI department.

In the new part of the Prague campus visitors could try autonomous parking between two vehicles on a fishbone (diagonal) parking slot, they were introduced to the moving-off information system (MOIS) and blind spot detection (BSIS) on vehicles from the Commercial Vehicles’ department, namely on a Tatra truck and Crafter van. They could also visit our Valeo bus in which they could see how the Scala lidar sensor works. They experienced ViL – Vehicle in the Loop testing which means testing a real vehicle in a virtual environment. The test bench generates images from cameras and signals from ultrasonic sensors and sends them to the ECU of the automated parking system, while also reading back the odometry of the vehicle. Finally, they had a tour of the laboratory for testing electric compressors and air conditioning units.

The weather was not very kind to us, but the afternoon filled with demonstrations, lectures and technical discussions made up for this unpleasant weather. Everything went well and we are looking forward to next years in the future.