News

Seven fantastic projects have now been nominated by our community as the most ground-breaking since SAFER was born 15 years ago.

Which one do you think deserve the anniversary award? Cast your vote for the project, or cluster of projects, that you think has been the most ground-breaking or has created new knowledge that has really contributed to great joint progress within the SAFER partnership. The voting ends September 15 and the winning project will be presented at the lunch seminar at the celebrations September 29.

Read about the seven excellent SAFER high-profile projects below.

Link to voting (you can only vote once): https://fm.webforum.com/safer/form.asp?sid=102010546

Welcome to cast your vote!

1.    SALIENCE4CAV
How do we know automated vehicles will be safe when introduced to the market? This is what the project SALIENCE4CAV is going to find out. The project is a continuation of several projects, originated from SAFER; FUSE (Functional Safety and Evolvable architectures for autonomy) and ESPLANADE (Efficient and Safe Product Lines of Architectures eNabling Autonomous DrivE). The focus of these projects has been to support a safe implementation of self-driving vehicles and contribute to one of SAFER's main research questions - how to verify and validate assisted and automated systems in cooperation. This third project, which started up early 2021, will continue the work on how to ensure safety and how to use existing safety standards, e.g. ISO26262. The focus is to enable iterative development for safety-critical products, that is, development of products and enabling of upgrades much more often. The project also ties in very well with the knowledge building that is carried out within the framework of the SAFER competence network Automotive Safety Assurance.

2.    EU-VIRTUAL
This project builds on a chain of HBM projects and has a few unique features that stems from the special spirit of SAFER. 1) It is the world’s first project aimed at providing a family of Open Source HBMs. 2)The project puts full focus on diversity and uses the 50th percentile female size as the baseline. 3) The project has created an open-source web platform that is open for developers all over the world to provide and share their contributions. 4) The project has set up a legal entity and a mechanism that will enable a continually long-lived community driven development of new improved versions, using other open-source initiatives such as LINUX or Wikipedia as raw models. For addressing the need for female human body models, based on female data from the start (no morphing/scaling from male anthropometry). This is the correct way (using female data from the get-go) to ensure that females are accounted for when assessing human body protection!

3.    “Småfolk” Rear Seat Safety for Short Occupants
This is one of the early projects within SAFER. It was created – in line with SAFER’s ambitions – to elaborate research by joining efforts. Ongoing child safety research within different partners were joined into one project. Research by two industrial PhD students from Saab and Autoliv, respectively, were complemented with a PhD student at Chalmers and connected to the child safety research at Volvo Cars, joining forces under the name of SAFER. This project was the starting point of SAFER’s child (and short adult) safety and rear seat safety research, and quickly reached international recognition. This first project was followed by a part II in 2012-2016 and thereafter the projects, “Passenger Safety”, part 1 and 2, which incorporated and expanded the area contributing to setting agenda for child occupant protection and driving the research border of real-world passenger protection. Numerous SAFER publications and presentations have resulted from these projects foresighted and contributed to regulations and standards. 

4.    Cluster of Human Body Model (HBM) projects at SAFER
They have resulted in the two families of HBM’s, SAFER-HBM and VIVA+. These two HBM-families put SAFER on the world map in the field of occupant crash simulation. They are the result of a long and firm commitment from SAFER partners to make a long-term investment and build a unique community with strong competence and a well developed network. At the early stages of SAFER, two SAFER projects were granted on the topic of Human Body Models (HBM) one focusing injury prediction and biofidelity of the models and one exploring the possibilities of modeling muscle control, enabling the HBM to be used in evasive manoeuvres potentially preceding the crash. In addition, financial support was given to Chalmers to hire a senior researcher, with the task to start building a research group within the area. Since then, numerous projects on HBM have been granted funded (mainly from FFI and Vinnova), and associated to SAFER. Continuously, SAFER partners have joined efforts in strategical discussions and shared thoughts and plans on how to proceed over time. A vision was established in early days to develop a model that was: “tunable and scalable, with omni-directional biofidelity and injury prediction capabilities for whole sequence, i.e. both low-g and high-g events”. Fifteen years ago, this was utopia, now it is reality, and we are working on refinements, usability and shareability. The different projects were designed in line with the vision and with a continuous interaction between the projects, as well as project partners, to achieve the joint model. Hence, this area is not only a role model for excellent and borderline research, it is also a role model for how the collaboration within the SAFER community can achieve more than just single project execution. This nomination is mainly motivated by the area’s importance for making SAFER well known and acknowledged, as a role model for collaborative research and as a showcase on what two limited SAFER projects can result in.

5.    Euro-FOT and SAFER’s naturalistic driving data bases
SAFER is a world leader in data collection and analysis of naturalistic driving studies (NDS) and a designated hub for European data collection. The SAFER Naturalistic Driving Data platform is a secure, world-class platform for handling data from naturalistic driving data collection. Providing state-of-the-art data management, several large datasets and a leading research competence regarding naturalistic driving data, this platform gives unique access to naturalistic data derived from 7,5 million driving kilometers. SAFER’s world leading cluster of researchers connected to naturalistic data activities has an internationally acknowledged reputation to a large extent due to conscious strategic choices and activities throughout all years from the start of SAFER. Databases with field data have a long history at SAFER and have continuously evolved together with the kind of data collected and the analysis to be performed.  Over the years, the unique databases, Euro-FOT data included, have contributed to several prestigious international assignments and projects. These activities have made it possible for SAFER partners to take leading roles in international research projects on data activities and SAFER has become a data node for in-depth naturalistic driving data.

6.    AI Aware
The project is breaking new ground by opening a door to the future of AI based accident prevention and the enablement of traffic safety on system level. The project has successfully developed innovative technology that estimates the traffic accident intensity for individual vehicles, based on e g weather, traffic flow, road geometry, friction, etc. This allows for several exciting applications: possibility to evaluate routes based on accident risk suggesting actions to the driver to minimize accident risk, e g lowering speed at certain spots or suggesting alternative routes help determining when to engage/disengage AD/ADAS de-centralized traffic control that minimizes congestion etc. The project is unique and has the potential to save numerous lives in traffic annually. This has been done through true collaboration between public and private actors with live real-world data from connected vehicles and the connected traffic system. This is a breakthrough as it is already working for real and now can be used to be built out with more precise algorithms and more data types. As it predicts increased risk it can be used in real time to reduce those risks before an accident happens. The project has amazing potential for real world implementation in large scale and will forever change how we think about traffic safety.

7.    “Active-HBM” Development of Active HBM in Frontal Impact Situations 
This is a relatively early SAFER project; a commitment that really has paid out. The project was followed by a series of projects on Active human body models (HBM), financed by FFI (Active-HBM steps 2- 5) as well as parts of SAFER associated EU projects such OSCCAR, VIRTUAL and SafeUP. The long series of continuous projects has further developed and refined the Active parts of the SAFER HBM, keeping it a state-of-the-art model, well acknowledge globally. Starting as an exploratory and relatively high-risk project, taking on a significant computational challenge, it grew to a successful and important research area, not only for SAFER but also contributing to the global evolution. The project pioneered an area that has grown to be one of the main topics in biomechanics and crashworthiness research today. The continuous evolution (by the strategical project portfolio over the years) and the constant referencing to “SAFER research” have substantially contributed to spread SAFER’s name as such, and to make it associated to state-of-the art research specifically. SAFER is a globally acknowledged main contact for expertise within research on Active human body modelling. 

The award winner is selected as follows: A total of 250 points are awarded and a jury consisting of SAFER's management team distributes half of the points (125p) and SAFER's community distributes 125 points. The winner in each vote category receives 45 points and the rest is distributed as below:
# 1:45
# 2: 30
# 3: 20
# 4: 15
# 5: 10
# 6: 5
# 7: 0

The project with most points in total from the jury and the community will be awarded the SAFER 15 Year anniversary award.