ECSEL JU Project PRYSTINE

Fully automated driving is one major enabler to master the Grand Societal Challenges of safe, clean and efficient mobility, and autonomous driving will affect society and most disruptively change the automotive industry as we know it today. Consequently it will also greatly impact the semiconductor industry and open new market opportunities, since semiconductors play an indispensable role as enablers for automated vehicles. 

Fail-operational behaviour is essential in the automation chain, in order to handle safety-critical situations on its own. State-of-the-art approaches cannot reach this, in part due to a lack of reliable environment perception and sensor fusion.

PRYSTINE will realize Fail-operational Urban Surround Perception (FUSION) which is based on robust Radar and LiDAR sensor fusion and control functions, to enable safe automated driving in urban and rural environments. It will strengthen and extend traditional core competencies of the European industry, research and universities in smart mobility and in particular the electronic components and cyber-physical systems domains.

Technically, project targets are to develop and validate new, fail operational HW/SW platforms, high performance and dependable perception (sensor fusion on different levels) and AI-based decision-making algorithms – the functional safety methodologies are applied from the chip to the system level.

PRYSTINE will deliver:
fail-operational sensor-fusion framework on component level;
dependable embedded E/E architectures, and
safety compliant integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches for object recognition, scene understanding, and decision making within automotive applications. 

The resulting reference FUSION architectures and reliable components for autonomous systems will be validated in 22 industrial demonstrators, including an electrical and highly automated commercial truck equipped with new FUSION components (such as LiDAR, Radar, camera systems, safety controlers) for advanced perception and a highly connected passenger car anticipating traffic situations

PRYSTINE’s well-balanced, value chain oriented consortium, is composed of 60 project partners from 14 different European and non-European countries, including leading car manufacturers, Tier-1 suppliers, engineering and semiconductor suppliers as well as supply chain partners, technology integrators, universities and research institutes. The project will also have significant impact on smart regions. High tech jobs in the area of innovation toward automated driving which are expressed core competencess of the participating countries such as Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.