Today’s driver assistance systems offer comfort and safety in sound environmental conditions. However, in harsh environment conditions – when needed most – systems stop working due to reduced sensor information quality. Targeting to the area of highly automated driving the improvement of perception, decision and planning under adverse conditions is one of the main challenges to be addressed. RobustSENSE is a project aiming at automated and safe mobility. Its goal is making systems able to cope with real world requirements under all environmental conditions. The RobustSENSE system introduces reliable, secure and trustable sensors and software by implementing self-diagnosis, adaptation and robustness. By managing diversity, complexity and safety it increases yield, robustness and reliability. RobustSENSE develops metrics to measures sensor system reliability on every level of assistance and automation systems as well as investigate approaches to improve the system. RobustSENSE thus aims at enhancing the robustness of all sensing methods and algorithms required for advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving. RobustSENSE moves from a platform consisting of several independent subsystems to a holistic approach. RobustSENSE introduces both, reliability measures and self monitoring across all levels of the system allowing two things: 1) Taking appropriate actions and algorithms on the respective system level to react on performance reduction caused by technical failure or changing environment conditions and 2) propagating reliability measures to a higher system level for decision making and taking appropriate actions therein. Thus, the area of operation of highly automated driving functions is permanently adapted to the present available performance of the perception and decision making system in order to guarantee a safe driving status at any time.

VIZTA project, coordinated by ST Micrelectronics, aims at developing innovative technologies in the field of optical sensors and laser sources for short to long-range 3D-imaging and to demonstrate their value in several key applications including automotive, security, smart buildings, mobile robotics for smart cities, and industry4.0. The key differentiating 12-inch Silicon sensing technologies developed during VIZTA are: • Innovative SPAD and lock-in pixel for Time of Flight architecture sensors • Unprecedent and cost-effective NIR and RGB-Z filters on-chip solutions • complex RGB+Z pixel architectures for multimodal 2D/3D imaging For short-range sensors : advanced VCSEL sources including wafer-level GaAs optics and associated high speed driver These developed differentiating technologies allows the development and validation of innovative 3D imaging sensors products with the following highly integrated prototypes demonstrators: • High resolution (>77 000 points) time-of-flight ranging sensor module with integrated VCSEL, drivers, filters and optics. • Very High resolution (VGA min) depth camera sensor with integrated filters and optics For Medium and Long range sensing, VIZTA also adresses new LiDAR systems with dedicated sources, optics and sensors Technology developments of sensors and emitters are carried out by leading semiconductor product suppliers (ST Microelectronics, Philips, III-V Lab) with the support of equipment suppliers (Amat, Semilab) and CEA Leti RTO. VIZTA project also include the developement of 6 demonstrators for key applications including automotive, security, smart buildings, mobile robotics for smart cities, and industry4.0 with a good mix of industrial and academic partners (Ibeo, Veoneer, Ficosa, Beamagine, IEE, DFKI, UPC, Idemia, CEA-List, ISD, BCB, IDE, Eurecat). VIZTA consortium brings together 23 partners from 9 countries in Europe: France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Luxembourg, Latvia, Sweden, Hungary, and United Kingdom.