BERTHA project’s kick-off meeting
The Horizon Europe project BERTHA celebrated its kick-off meeting from the 22nd to the 24th of November 2023, hosted by the coordinator Instituto de Biomecánica de Valencia (IBV) at its offices in Valencia, Spain.
The project has been granted €7,981,799.50 from the European Commission to develop a Driver Behavioral Model (DBM) that can be used in connected autonomous vehicles to make them safer and more human-like. The resulting DBM will be available on an open-source HUB to validate its feasibility, and it will also be implemented in CARLA, an open-source autonomous driving simulator.
The consortium, which was present at the kick-off, includes leading organisations like Instituto de Biomecánica de Valencia (IBV) (ES), Institut Vedecom (FR), Université Gustave Eiffel (FR), German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DE), Computer Vision Center (ES), Altran Deutschland (DE), Continental Engineering Services (FR), CIDAUT Foundation (ES), Austrian Institute of Technology (AT), Universitat de València (ES), Europcar International (FR), FI Group (PT), Panasonic Automotive Systems Europe (DE) and the Korea Transport Institute (KOTI).
During the event, all partners met each other, shared their technical backgrounds and presented their expected contributions to the project.
Moreover, a visit to IBV facilities was performed and some collaborative workshops were organised to exchange ideas on the Driver Behavioral Model, the data HUB, the HAV (Human Autonomous Vehicle) simulator based on CARLA and the foreseen use cases.
The meetings ended with a session to coordinate and plan the upcoming activities and deliverables.
“The lack of a validated Driver Behavioral Model (DBM) with the potential to cover holistic, personal and cultural, human driving factors is a crucial gap for the development of automated driving systems. BERTHA plans to fill this gap with a scalable DBM based on probabilistic principles. Beyond model development, our human-centred methodology and demonstrators will serve as guiding lights, showcasing the potential of our DBM approach, and enhancing the competitiveness of European industries.
I’m excited about the journey ahead and the transformative impact BERTHA will have on contributing to social acceptance of future mobility services, maintaining humans in the loop and enhancing inclusion.”
Begoña Mateo, project coordinator at IBV