Consortium

With 119 production facilities and a broad product range stretching from city cars to luxury cars and commercial vehicles, offering different powertrain technologies, including hybrid and electric vehicles, the Volkswagen Group has grown to be one of the largest globally active automotive manufacturers with world-wide sales exceeding 10 million units in 2014. Volkswagen’s Group Research has its headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany and works on innovations for all Group brands, spanning the full spectrum of automotive domain. Volkswagen Group spent over 11 billion Euro on research and development in 2014, more than any other company in the world.

Consistently ranked among the top universities in the world, ETH Zurich is an academic institution with excellent track record of research and teaching since 1885. The university is associated with 21 Nobel Laureates who have studied, taught or conducted research there. The Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) of ETH Zurich, is internationally renowned in the field of autonomous robot design and navigation with great experience in design and navigation of wheeled, legged and flying robots operating in different types of environments. With involvement in several National, European and ESA projects together with both academic and industrial partners, the lab currently hosts more than 50 researchers and application engineers. Research achievements in the lab have been commercialized by realizing seven spin-off companies since its foundation.

IBM is a globally integrated technology and consulting company headquartered in Armonk, New York. With operations in more than 170 countries, IBM attracts and retains some of the world’s most talented people to help solve problems and provide an edge for businesses, governments and non-profits. Innovation is at the core of IBM’s strategy. The company develops and sells software and systems hardware and a broad range of infrastructure, cloud and consulting services. Today, IBM is focused on five initiatives – business analytics, cloud computing, social/engagement, mobile and security.

For more than seven decades, IBM Research has defined the future of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents. Scientists from IBM Research have produced six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals of Technology, five U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing Awards, 19 inductees in the National Academy of Sciences and 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (UTC) is one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in Romania and dates back to 1920. Study programs in Automation and in Computer Science were started since 1977. Since its birth, the Faculty of Automation and Computer Science has earned an international reputation for its high academic standards and excellence in research. The Computer Science Department approaches a wide range of research topics which addresses both theoretical and applicative issues in Computer Science and Information Technology. The Department is involved in national and international research grants and contracts in cooperation with other universities or industrial partners.
The Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Research Centre (IPPRRC), part of the Computer Science Department, is involved in multiple computer vision related research subjects, a significant part of the effort being directed to finding original, robust and fast solutions for environment perception and scene understanding.

The Czech Technical University in Prague established in 1707 is the leading Czech university of technology. The project team comes from its Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotic and Cybernetics, which is also active in autonomous robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. The team has been involved in European, Czech national and industrial projects. The team has experience with technology transfer also through several spin-out companies.