Electro-mobility offers a variety of benefits. However, the electrification of road freight transport is not viable by using on-board storage of electricity. The electric roads can solve this problem by providing electrical power to the truck as it is driving through overhead electrical cables. However, the critical problem of electric roads is how to connect the truck, through the pantograph, to the power source. At speeds of 90 km/h, trucks must know the position of the cables 100-150m ahead in order to adjust the pantograph’s position in time to ensure that it correctly engages with the electrical cables. When using current solutions such as Radar, Lidar or Cameras trucks cannot travel at more than 30km/h and even so, often disengage from the cables. This is inefficient, dangerous and can significantly damage the cables. Today there is no technology that can detect and guide a pantograph at high speed and with the accuracy required to effectively charge the truck. At Qamcom Research and Technology AB, we have designed and tested an innovative solution named the Pantograph Active Control System (PACS) that enables fast communication between the energy source and trucks. PACS is composed of two elements: - Communicating devices located on every pole that transmits its position as well the position of the upcoming pole to approaching trucks - A high frequency radar located on top of the truck’s cabin that detects the transponder signals And exhibits the following characteristics: - Modulation of radar signals - Short reading times enabling high speed data transmission - Detection of the geographical position of the data sources PACS has been tested within the e-highway context on an e-highway test strip in Sweden and has shown excellent results. We now what to use the SME instrument to develop the solution alongside truck OEMs and bring PACS to the market. Market estimates predict that by 2024 there will be over 100,000 electric trucks with over 40,000 Km of e-roads

Over the past few years, we have been witnessing an increasing presence and usage of wearable sensing and quantified- self devices. The rise of embedded and wearable computing is expected to bring the next revolution of the Internet of Sports, enhancing fitness, performance health, productivity and safety as well as creating new jobs and opening new markets. Nevertheless, at a European level, there is a recognized shortage of highly skilled researchers, scientists and engineers with transferable skills and entrepreneurial experience, trained in building IT platforms and service infrastructures capable of hosting innovative collective sensing services and applications. The RAIS consortium comprising 6 beneficiaries and 7 fully committed partner organizations, aspires to establish the core for a fertile multidisciplinary research and innovation community with strong entrepreneurial culture that will advance:1) wearable sport-sensing and quantified-self devices and accompanying middleware;2) technologies of Big Data mining and analytics that are needed to capture a broad range of users’ sports- and wellness-related information.The main objective of RAIS is to provide world class training for a next generation of researchers, computer scientists, and data engineers, emphasizing a strong combination of advanced understanding in both theoretical and experimental approaches, methodologies and tools that are required to develop decentralized, scalable, and secure collective sensing infrastructures and platforms. RAIS training network will fund 14 ESRs, 3 workshops, 1 Hackathlon event, 1 entrepreneurship event, 3 summer schools and a final Conference. To meet this goal, RAIS will focus on developing new technologies on Big Data Analytics on the Edge, Data Stream Processing, Distributed and Decentralized Machine Learning, Blockchain as well as Security/Privacy. These topics include important and timely research challenges with an immediate exploitation potential.

SafeCOP (Safe Cooperating Cyber-Physical Systems using Wireless Communication) will establish a safety assurance approach, a platform architecture, and tools for cost-efficient and practical certification of cooperating cyber-physical systems (CO-CPS). SafeCOP targets safety-related CO-CPS characterized by use of wireless communication, multiple stakeholders, dynamic system definitions, and unpredictable operating environments. In this scenario, no single stakeholder has the overall responsibility over the resulted system-of-systems; safe cooperation relies on the wireless communication; and security and privacy are important concerns. Although such CO-CPS can successfully address several societal challenges, and can lead to new applications and new markets, their certification and development is not adequately addressed by existing practices. SafeCOP will provide an approach to the safety assurance of CO-CPS, enabling thus their certification and development. The project will define a platform architecture and will develop methods and tools, which will be used to produce safety assurance evidence needed to certify cooperative functions. SafeCOP will extend current wireless technologies to ensure safe and secure cooperation. SafeCOP will also contribute to new standards and regulations, by providing certification authorities and standardization committees with the scientifically validated solutions needed to craft effective standards extended to also address cooperation and system-of-systems issues. SafeCOP brings clear benefits in terms of cross-domain certification practice and implementations of cooperating systems in all addressed areas: automotive, maritime, healthcare and robotics. The advantages include lower certification costs, increased trustworthiness of wireless communication, better management of increasing complexity, reduced effort for verification and validation, lower total system costs, shorter time to market and increased market share.

Farming is facing many economic challenges in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness, as well as an increasing labour shortage partly due to depopulation of rural areas. Furthermore, reliable detection, accurate identification and proper quantification of pathogens and other factors affecting both plant and animal health, are critical to be kept under control in order to reduce economic expenditures, trade disruptions and even human health risks. AFarCloud will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming that will allow the integration and cooperation of agriculture Cyber Physical Systems in real-time in order to increase efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduce farm labour costs. This platform will be integrated with farm management software and will support monitoring and decision-making solutions based on big data and real time data mining techniques. The AFarCloud project also aims to make farming robots accessible to more users by enabling farming vehicles to work in a cooperative mesh, thus opening up new applications and ensuring re-usability, as heterogeneous standard vehicles can combine their capabilities in order to lift farmer revenue and reduce labour costs. The achievements from AFarCloud will be demonstrated in 3 holistic demonstrators (Finland, Spain and Italy), including cropping and livestock management scenarios and 8 local demonstrators (Latvia, Sweden, Spain and Czech Republic) in order to test specific functionalities and validate project results in relevant environments located in different European regions. AFarCloud outcomes will strengthen partners’ market position boosting their innovation capacity and addressing industrial needs both at EU and international levels. The consortium represents the whole ICT-based farming solutions’ value chain, including all key actors needed for the development, demonstration and future market uptake of the precision farming framework targeted in the project.

2030 and beyond, Europe and the world will face opportunities and challenges of growth and sustainability of tremendous magnitude; to pro-actively tackle issues of green deal efficiency, digital inclusion and assurance of health and safety in a post pandemic world will be key. A powerful vision is needed to connect physical, digital, and human worlds, firmly anchored in future wireless technology and architectural research. The Hexa-X vision calls for an x-enabler fabric of connected intelligence, networks of networks, sustainability, global service coverage, extreme experience, and trustworthiness. Wireless technologies are of critical relevance for our society and economy today; their importance for growth will continue to steadily increase with 5G and its evolution, enabling new ecosystems and services motivated by strongly growing traffic and trillions of devices. The Hexa-X project ambition includes to develop key technology enablers in the areas of (i) fundamentally new radio access technologies at high frequencies and high-resolution localization and sensing; (ii) connected intelligence though AI-driven air interface and governance for future networks, and (iii) 6G architectural enablers for network disaggregation and dynamic dependability. Europe has been a leader in wireless network technologies for decades. It is now critical to unleash our best brains in the joint research ambition of a “flagship” project to maintain the global industry leadership for the B5G/6G era. The Hexa-X flagship is a unique effort of vision, and an opportunity for disruptive impact in sustainable growth and technology experience in Europe and worldwide!