Bruna Fonseca, EU Grants Manager at FI Group Portugal, gave an interview about the BERTHA project on January 19th 2024 at TSF Rádio Notícias / Negócios em Português.

Transcription of the interview in English

Her name is BERTHA. It aims to be a scalable and probabilistic Driver Behavioural Model for driving the steering wheel of an autonomous car. But it’s not alone. It needs CARLA, which is the simulator that will make it possible to carry out the first pilot tests of the consortium.

We’re talking about a project launched now to be developed over three years, funded with almost €8 million by the European Union and involving a consortium of 14 partners from six different countries, including a Portuguese team from the FI Group, and coordinated by the Biomechanics Institute of the Spanish city of Valencia.

And that’s not the only project in the company’s plans, as Bruna Fonseca, EU Grants Manager at FI Group Portugal, reveals.

“This project is made up of 14 organisations from six countries.

For the last two years, we’ve started to position ourselves as a partner in some of these projects, even at the invitation of the clients themselves who are coordinating the initiatives. The BERTHA project will already be our third one. We’re heading towards the fifth in Portugal.

We are involved in BERTHA, HEALING BAT and 2DNeuralVision. One is more in the area of batteries, the other in photonics and the BERTHA project in the area of autonomous driving, in the development of a Behavioural Model for autonomous driving.

This project was supposed to start a little earlier, but it finally kicked off in October 2023 and, if I’m not mistaken, is due to end in 2026. However, the FI Group’s obligations will extend beyond this time frame, because we have to guarantee that the project will continue to be disseminated and eventually exploited by the same partners or other organisations for up to four years after its completion.

It is funded with almost €8 million, it’s 100% funded. And we’re talking about a project that is still of a research nature, therefore of low levels of technological maturity. So it’s still intended to start as an idea and end at what we call a lab-scale prototype, but at the end of the project, it’s intended to reach a TRL 4.

And we believe that afterwards, perhaps through a funded project or the interest of one of the partners involved, perhaps in the same period we can bring this solution to what we call TRL or maturity level 7 or 8, and then, it will be ready to enter the market and be integrated into new vehicles.

And also, we are involved in another project of a different character, which is Digital Built, which won’t be so much about research and innovation, but more about building or implementing a hub to provide services to SMEs in the construction area, digitalisation services.

For now, FI Group Portugal projects include participation in BERTHA, which consists of developing a model of autonomous cars that are safer and behave in a similar way to human beings.”

Bruna Fonseca, EU Grants Manager at FI Group Portugal