Prof. Toralf Trautmann from University of Applied Science (Dresden, Germany) visitied GEOTEC on October 28th, 2021. Toralf’s research is focused on the intersection of programming, sensing capabilities, and automotive engineering in order to conceive the connected vehicles of the future.

In his talk titled “Environmental sensors in automotive applications”, Toral showed us the special equipment such as test cars fully equipped with lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors. In his group they run simulations at a local scale, based on Unity, and at larger scales based on the SUMO engine (Simulation of Urban MObility), and compared the results obtained with real mobility conditions like real-time traffic data.

Big actors in the automotive sector and sensing computing companies are joint working to advance in turning vehicles into fully connected systems with the surrounding environment. In-lab and controlled experiments are a pre-requisits to test self-driving cars in real roads

Apart from the scientific topics covered, Toralf and GEOTEC also started a conversation to establish education-realted joint activities such as master degrees, summers schools even students exchange among the two institutions. Of course, starting from small is a sensible approach to establish a collaboration in the long run, ,so a kind of joint summer school covering common and shared topics could be a good starting point. Indeed, many common research interests came out after Toralf’s talk, especially to integrate mobile programming, sensing computing, geospatial technologies and location position analysis into the vast, complex and interdisciplinary field of the connected vehicle.

Thanks Toralf for your informative talk and fruitful visit! Looking forward to seeing GEOTEC and HTW collaborate in the future!