It becomes the second Galician company that receives such an important grant.
The SME Instrument is one of the leading programs of the Horizon 2020 plan, the main supporting plan for innovation and research in the European Union. In the Phase 1, technical and economical feasibility of the project is assessed, with a grant of 50,000€. The start-up Xesol already received this grant in 2016, along with the seal of Excellence. In the second phase, in which the amount of money granted rises up to 2.5 million euros, is aimed to activities such as demonstration, testing, trials and scaling, along with the development of a business plan, and it lasts between one and two years. In this call, 1,534 proposals were submitted, being selected only 71 of them, the 4.628% of the total.
The company has already received the first part of the funding and it continues with the illusion of competing with big companies of the sector like MobilEye, Google or Bosch, among others.
In 2017, Xesol began its international expansion, establishing in Germany, cradle of the Automobile sector in Europe, its first office outside the Spanish territory.
The Smartcars project aims to provide a low-cost advanced driver assistant system (ADAS) to improve road safety.
Using cameras and artificial vision, some of its features are detection and tracking of pedestrians, cyclists, cars, trucks, etc., identification of traffic signals, front and rear collision warning, detection of the road width and also lane departure warning.
Within the scale of the autonomous car, this software would allow, along with actors, to obtain an autonomous vehicle level 2-3.
With 19 companies selected, Spain was the most successful country in the call, followed by Germany and Ireland.The transportation and TIC programs were the most awarded fields with ten project each.
Smartcars is a mobility research project for transportation awarded in Brussels with a mention of excellence as the most innovative project of the Horizon 2020 programme. This project has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No. 767509.
