Grant: Alliance Grants

Bombardier Recreational Product (BRP), Liaido, Université de Sherbrooke (UdS), École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS) and Centre de Technologies Avancées (CTA) are partnering to increase capabilities in connectivity, emergency services access, driving safety and driver-automation interaction for new Smart, Connected, and Perceptive (SCoPe IoT) off-road vehicles. Recent advances in telecommunication, digital engineering, Internet-of-Things (IoT), embedded artificial intelligence, audio synthesis, and augmented reality (AR) open opportunities to develop novel user experiences. Developing vehicles that integrate such technologies will benefit customers and the industry, while pushing the envelope in inter-vehicular communication and multimodal human-machine interfaces (HMI). The project will develop a robust wireless mesh network for remote devices (such as vehicles), fusing different radio protocols. This will allow low-latency communication between devices in areas that are not well covered with regular telecommunication towers, allowing a broad range of functionality, including anti-collision interventions, proximity warnings for vehicles, peer-to-peer connectivity and wireless hotspot internet distribution. The project will also explore data science applications on the edge and in the cloud, as well as a rich user interface offering advanced machine interaction through augmented reality and audio synthesis. Rural locations in Canada still struggle to access reliable communications. Only 45.6% of rural households and 34.8% of First Nations Reservations have access to Internet. The proposed fusion of cellular, satellite and peer-to-peer mesh networking constitutes a cost-effective solution where building large telecommunication infrastructure is not economically viable, while providing a better quality of service. The proposed technology will find applications beyond off-road vehicles, such as in forestry, agriculture, mining, fishing, hydropower, etc.