Presentation of NEXYAD products for European Car Industry (February 4, 2014)

Here are the powerpoint sildes of presentation of NEXYAD Automotive & Transportation : PDF Here

– Visibility measurement in your lab (Testing Application : for wipers, washer, windshield, rain sensor, lighting, demist, …) VisiNex

– Onboard Software (Artificial Vision) blocs for your ADAS development : (road detection) RoadNex, (road safety assessment) SafetyNex, (drowsiness detection) DrowsiNex, (visibility measurement) VisiNex Onboard, (obstacle/pedestrian detection) ObstaNex

Poster publication of the Visibility measurement research project (SURVIE – Mov’eo) conclusions at the “carrefours du PREDIT”, in Paris, Palais Broigniart (October 7-8, 2013)

The project SURVIE was headed by NEXYAD with the research partners AXIMUM, CETE, IFSTTAR, OKTAL, SAINT GOBAIN, VALEO.

The goal of this project was to validate standard measurement protocols for different testing usages of the test bench tool VisiNex (developed by NEXYAD : click HERE to know more) : measurement of the performance of every system in a car that was made to restore visibility : lighting, wipers, demist, defrost, hydrophobic windshield, …

SURVIE was a collaborative research program of the competitive cluster Mov’eo.






NEXYAD joins the business cluster ITS Infra (Mov’eo) / NEXYAD rejoint le Groupement de Pme ITS Infra (intégration des technologies de l’information dans les infrastructures routières) du pôle de compétitivité Mov’eo (September 23, 2013)

NEXYAD joins the hich tech SMEs business cluster ITS Infra (Information Technologies for intelligent road infrastructures) :
. Visibility measurement / mesure de la visibilité
. Bad weather identification using artificial vision based-systems (rain, fog, smoke, …) / identification des intempéries par caméra (pluie, brouillard, fumées, …)
. Smart camera based application / applications des cameras intelligentes
. Statistics and data analysis on the road traffic / statistiques sur le traffic routier

This business cluster gathers high tech SMEs of the Competitive Cluster Mov’eo.

NEXYAD joins the business cluster INI (in Mov’eo) / NEXYAD rejoint le Groupement INI (Intégration du Numérique pour l’Industrie) du pôle de compétitivité Mov’eo (July 1, 2013)






NEXYAD joins the high tech business cluster INI (Integration of Digital Technologies into Industrial applications) :
. Special machines for quality control and intelligent sorting and defects detection
. Integration of cameras, sensors, actuators, digital pasting, computers, software, … into car prototypes
and complex products
. Portable diagnosis systems
. Communication car to car and car to back office (geo localization, statistics, …)
. Library for real time ADAS development

SMEs of this business cluster gather their products, know how and skills, in order to bring new innovative wing to wing solution to customers.

Link : http://groupementini.canalblog.com/

INI is a business clusters of SMEs gathered by Mov’eo

Official web site (French spoken) : http://www.pole-moveo.org/

Blog of the High Technologies SMEs of Mov’eo : http://pole-moveo.org/moveo-blog/

Closing meeting of the collaborative research project SURVIE : 2012 June 28 in Paris (June 13, 2012)

The closing meeting of the collaborative research project SURVIE will take place the 28th of June 2012, in the Région Ile de France office in Paris.

SURVIE dealt with measurement of visibility during recovery (wipers, lights, demist, defrost, etc …). Measurement was performed using the onl device in the worl that can measure visibility for a human being ; VisiNex Developed par the company Nexyad.

The project gathered Saint Gobain, Valeo, CETE Lyon laboratory (Clermont Ferrand Lab), Oktal, Aximum, Nexyad.

Project Purpose: Research on the technical ways to improve or restore visibility to the driver, and development of new functionalities of VisiNex.

Several innovative measurement functionalities could be integrated to VisiNex by Nexyad, allowing partners to improve their understanding of visibility recovery in many cases of real world scenes.

This research program got the label of the French competitive cluster on automotive and transportation mov’eo.

NEXYAD developed a new release of their VisiNex™ product (March 7, 2011)

NEXYAD developed a new release of their VisiNex™ product (visibility measurement using a camera) : new version can give local visibility scores and their distribution on the whole windshield of a car (applications are wipers efficiency enhancement and misting system efficiency measurement and enhancement for car industry).

ADAS demonstration (March 31, 2011)

NEXYAD demonstrated a result of the research program MERIT at the members day of the Competitive Cluster Mov’eo :
onboard road recognition, visibility measurement, obstacle detection, and road safety level estimation … implanted into a 3G mobile phone (Android OS)

Test the effectiveness of wipers and tune a wiper system : a complex problem (March 15, 2010)

The modern wiper systems for car windshields are complex mechatronics systems that implement both sensors (light sensor, rain sensor), electric motors, one or more wiper blades with rubber qualities to be defined, a software for analysis and recognition of the rain, and a software that automatically triggers the wipers with an appropriate strategy. Each of these components can be selected or adjusted by many ways:
– Rain sensor: location of the rain sensor on the windshield, adjusting the threshold of the first outbreak, its timings, its hysteresis, …
– Luminance Sensor: taking into account only the integration of infrared or visible wavelengths, the sensor location and direction (does is point only the sky?) …
– Rubbers : quality of the viscoelastic material, surface condition, …
– Arm of the wiper: with pressure points, shape memory, …
– Architecture of wipers: conventional two blades, butterfly with a stop in the down position, with throttle stop position, single blade, …
– Characteristics of wipability of the windshield (macroscopic form: take-off speeds, … surface condition)
– Not to mention the software that have huge degrees of freedom (lines of code) …

If we consider a system composed of six subsystems that can each take 10 different items (10 items of rubber, 10 potential triggering software, 10 settings of the rain sensor, …), we obtain 106 possible systems (1 million) !

On a million possible systems, the engineers have to find ONE solution that is industrially acceptable (effectiveness, overall cost of the solution …).

The traditional method and still the most widespread in the industry to test and develop such a system consists in equiping a vehicle with a configuration (set a priori), in waiting for rain, and then sending a expert driver driving on roads they know. The driver then completes qualitative assessment grids which are used by engineers to change the settings of their wiper system.

Obviously, this method is tedious, and they can only test an extremely small number of combinations, so that it passes next to the statistically best solution (the best compromise between performance and cost). In addition, weather conditions in several consecutive tests may NOT be the same: it is NEVER the same rain, NEVER the same light, …
Performance comparisons are theoretically and therefore virtually impossible: no regression testing can be performed at every change, no quantitative rating of the effectiveness can be given … in short, despite all the expertise of engineers and the care they take to perform these tests, it is far from the industrial approach, let alone the quality approach.

The sampling of this complexity requires the use of at least fractional orthogonal experimental design. For this it is necessary to know how to reproduce the weather conditions in the laboratory, dive the vehicle into a known and reproducible (calibrated) environment, and then quantitatively measure the performance of the wiping.

NEXYAD has developed a tool to achieve this. This tool is divided into three major functions:
– A system for generating calibrated lighting (to generate repeatable chronograms of illumination).
– A system for generating calibrated and reproducible artificial rainfall, (for watering the windshield with known artificial rainfall, with statistical characteristics of natural rainfall)
– A system for measuring the effectiveness of the wiper system (providing a score of effectiveness)

The measurement of effectiveness of the wiping was until fairly recently a point relatively blocker. Indeed, the wiper is not a « function » in terms of the driving task: the « function » would rather be « in all circumstances ensure good visibility for the driver”, and wiping is just a technical response to achieve that in the case where visibility is degraded by the water deposited on the windshield.

We then see that if we can measure the visibility of the road scene by the driver (through windshield), then we can measure the effectiveness of the wiping : the rain degrades the visibility, the wiping restores some of the lost visibility.

NEXYAD worked since 1995 on the measurement of visibility and has integrated his expertise in a tool called VisiNex ™.
Similarly, NEXYAD has developed a rain machine (RainNex ™).

The combined use of these tools can set a wiper system in two months with two people, where before we had 5 people for over a year. In addition, the system performance is known and can be optimized (since we know the measure). The technically efficient solutions can then be compared in terms of cost, allowing more to achieve substantial savings.

Some automotive industrials already use NEXYAD tools.