During the first half of the project, work focused on defining use cases in the application domains, capturing data for algorithmic development, and developing methods needed to implement the defined use cases.
The following use cases were identified at the beginning of the project to be implemented through pilots:
• Generating maps for navigation of autonomous mobile robots in manufacturing environments.
• Providing tourists the possibility to plan their trip using a VR representation of the city they want to visit.
• AR application to guide city tourists, taking in to account current visitor numbers at sights or the weather situation, even enabling tourists to peek into buildings/museums outside of opening hours.
• Using digital twins for city planning, e.g. assessing the effect on traffic when changing road layouts, or the effect of deployment of streetlights.
• Supporting city maintenance by using vehicle-based sensors (the same used to collect information on changes in the environment) to automatically detect issues around the city.
• Updating the geometry of parts of a digital twin based on recent sensor data, as a base application for all other use cases.
Data were captured or generated through a number of approaches (and where needed anonymised):
• A vehicle equipped with synchronised cameras, LIDAR, GPS
• Static cameras also providing depth information
• Autonomous mobile robots
• Software simulating vehicle based sensors (with the advantage to also provide training data for AI methods)
Furthermore, drone scans of the village of Etteln, Germany, (represented by FIWARE as one of the user partners) as well as a 3D-modle of the Voitor are available for research of methods and development of algorithms.
