CulturalRoad develops sustainable and population -wide accepted deployment plans for Cooperative, Connected, and Autonomous Mobility (CCAM) services by combining participatory planning with a novel Five-Pointed Star Rating system able to capture both cultural and geographical diversity. At its core, the project advocates for active engagement with local communities, gathering valuable insights on their mobility needs. Through participatory planning, stakeholders from various cultural backgrounds and geographical regions collaborate to share their mobility needs. This inclusive approach ensures that CCAM solutions are tailor-made to meet the distinct demands of each community, this is, it makes them vectors of a more equitable mobility.

FABulous will develop an industrial surface coating technology that exploits breakthroughs in multiphoton lithography and process modelling to manufacture high resolution 3D metasurfaces at a throughput viable for series production. These metasurfaces will be capable of manipulating light with unprecedented flexibility and will open the possibility of designing and manufacturing smaller, lighter, and more environmentally friendly products, through the replacement of bulky components and/or the chemical coatings currently used to enhance the efficiency and performance of optical products. The project will explore novel methods for rapid (>10cm2/min) micro-fabrication of high-resolution (smaller than 200nm) 3D structures, and the development of new production tools to optimise the design and integration of the metasurfaces into functional products. These innovations will then be scaled for commercial applications and integrated into an industrial platform with a quality assurance and control system, enabling the fabrication of 3D metasurfaces on a range of substrates with unprecedented productivity, resolution, flexibility, and reliability. The application of the technology and its potential to contribute to the design and manufacturing of more sustainable and circular European goods will also be demonstrated in a series of uses cases. The platform will be used to coat optical components (lenses, light pipes, and micro-optics arrays) with custom metasurfaces, and demonstrate that these components, when integrated into the design and manufacturing of functional optical systems (cameras, automotive lights and PV cells), can significantly improve their efficiency whilst in parallel reducing their environmental footprint.

In this project, leading European universities, research centers, and companies within the battery supply chain are bringing their expertise and innovations together to create the next-generation BMS platform able to overcome critical challenges limiting the performance of the existing solutions. iBattMan will incorporate novel sensors and methodologies for monitoring the State-of-Health (SOH) of the cells during operation and in charging, together with cutting-edge technologies and tools for V2X and second-life applications, and use advanced physics- and data-based models implemented on-board and on-cloud for performance evaluation, diagnosis, health management and safety evaluation tools, to trigger actions to address safety and cyber-security concerns. This will result in an innovative, modular and scalable BMS, for a wide range of vehicles, from small passenger cars to e-buses and electric trucks, with improved performance, connectivity, security and reliability to enhance battery performance and reduce total cost of ownership in EV applications and intelligent battery use for grid support and in 2nd life applications, based on a holistic design of an interoperable architecture and supported by a suite of advanced sensors and edge- and cloud-computational resources. This will represent an outstanding step forward in the EU battery development roadmap and enable accelerated market adoption of smart batteries to bring to market world-leading class Li-ion technologies to improve the cost-effectiveness, circularity, and sustainability of the EU battery industry by 2030-2035. It will support the integration of more renewables on the grid based on new concepts such as Smart Cities and Net Zero Buildings to benefit EV car manufacturers and complementary markets like urban mobility, 2nd life application for stationary storage, batteries, and battery recycling.

The global EV market is largely reliant on battery electric vehicles (BEVs) that employ lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, mostly based on liquid electrolytes. Due to extensive research and development of Li-ion, we are gradually reaching the maximum chemical potential of today’s electrode materials regarding Nickel-rich cathodes. Yet Li-ion based battery systems, based on liquid electrolytes, still face significant limitations , due to their chemistries, such as high flammability , potential safety risks, burning, and explosions, electrochemical instabilities, and low ion selectivity. In this regard, promising solutions are emerging in the form of solid-state battery EV (SSBEV) technology. However, the inherent differences between SSBs and traditional Li-ion batteries such as fundamentally distinct operating temperatures, charging rates, form factor and cell safety characteristics introduce complexities in integrating them into existing BEV systems, necessitating a redesign of the several systems. To meet this need, ARISE will develop an advanced solid-state, fourth generation (Gen-4) Li-ion battery system that offers advanced high-performance features, based on a cell-to-chassis concept with expandable modules that is applicable to any next generation S SBEV. ARISE will cover 3 different development paths: 1) a new city car chassis design utilizing SSBs that is expandable when needed, 2) a novel battery and pack level Thermal Management System compatible with SSBs, 3) Smart Battery Management System that controls battery expansion, fast charging, and safety.

SELFY will increase CCAM ecosystem’s safety, security, robustness, and resilience by researching and developing a toolbox made of collaborative tools which main pillars are: (i) situational awareness, through collaborative perception and monitoring; (ii) data sharing, advanced processing for detection of malicious events and decision-making; (iii) resilience, increased ability to adapt and respond to cyber-threats and cyber-attacks; and (iv) trust, including guarantees regarding privacy, confidentiality, integrity and immutability of data in a collaborative CCAM environment. SELFY tools can operate individually and/or cooperatively with other tools, generating a distributed global solution, where SELF-protection, SELF-response and SELF-recovery decisions will be managed locally or globally as appropriate for any given cyber-attack, malicious activity or hazard, extending the Operational Design Domain (ODD) In Europe, 50 million connected cars are expected in circulation by 2026, and EU regulations requires for cybersecurity certificates for vehicles. In this scenario, SELFY long term impact is grounded on a value proposition that is OEM and/or vendor agnostic, thus facilitating adoption at all stages of the value chain. Additionally, the consortium involves all necessary stakeholders for co-creating a sound and comprehensive CCAM solution: including OEMs, road operators, traffic and infrastructure management, researchers, and policy-makers. SELFY expected outcomes include 5 traffic and infrastructure management organizations adopting the SELFY toolbox, which will benefit of a >90% effectiveness rate in detection of vulnerable vehicles and security breaches and an increase of >75% off the mitigation rate at demonstrated in TRL6 by the end of the project.