The company has doubled its R&D resources and opened two new business lines since February 2018, Farroni reveals
Can you tell us about some of the latest R&D projects underway at MegaRide?
Thanks to the deep synergy between MegaRide and the University of Naples tire research group, the university is able to carry out a wide range of innovative R&D projects, while MegaRide works in parallel on product development.
In particular, current projects focus on onboard implementation of our technologies for real-time tire modeling, specifically evaluation of interaction forces, and consequently, friction, and its relationship with environmental conditions, tread temperature and wear, road roughness and compound viscoelasticity.
What are the key challenges in this area of development?
Porting from the offline tools to the onboard applications in the connected and smart mobility scenarios requires a significant change of approach. Data processing has to be performed in real time; specific filters and diagnostics procedures must concur to produce reliable results; and sensor fusion techniques merged to observers and machine learning algorithms enhance the possibility to provide robust output as a priority target.
Our methodologies, strongly based on the modeling of the physical systems equations and of the complex phenomena at vehicle/road interface, are deeply focused on predictivity and self-calibration of the onboard algorithms, in order to make them compliant with any vehicular platform, without empirical pre-calibrations.
How have your activities progressed since MegaRide was recognized as Tire Technology of the Year at the 2018 Tire Technology Expo Awards?
The tire analysis and simulation tools we have developed, which are employed by motorsport teams and car and tire manufacturers, have in the last year achieved the main specified targets: a high technical maturity and optimal standardization when interfacing with driving simulators and vehicle dynamics software.
Receiving the Tire Technology of the Year Award in the 2018 Tire Technology Expo Awards gave us an unbelievable push to achieve our current position in the market.
In just one year, we have opened communication with new partners and customers, our team has doubled its resources, and we have established two new research and business lines – one focused on human telemetry and another on HMI for motorsport.
We have also opened a new office in a startup incubator and a highly skilled expert from a F1 team has joined the company. It has been a fantastic 12 months!
