Indian student among top winners for Hyundai's innovation challenge

Korean carmajor Hyundai Motor Company has partnered with United States-based Brown University, coinciding with the launch of the ‘Hyundai Visionary Challenge’, which is part of its open innovation roadmap to lead the future mobility market and secure related capabilities in diverse industries. 

The partnership with Brown University will focus on developing future mobility solutions, which cover biologically inspired mobility, human-machine partnerships, and digital phenotyping. These project is aimed to further position Hyundai as a leader of the fourth industrial revolution with disruptive innovation that utilises professional knowledge in diverse fields, whilst tapping partners with insightful and creative ideas.

The 2018 Hyundai Visionary Challenge is a new open innovation project that intends to develop active partnerships within untapped fields, thereby discovering new creative and innovative ideas that will expedite the development of advanced future mobility technology.

The 2018 challenge saw participation of around 80 individuals from 17 teams including professors, undergraduates and graduate students. The four winners were announced at the 3rd Mobility Innovator’s Forum, which took place in Silicon Valley on November 16, 2018. The winners along with a cash prize received the opportunity to conduct joint industry-academic research with Hyundai, using the winning ideas as a foundation to develop an appropriate startup business.

The four winners of the challenge include: Robust bat-inspired aerial robotics by Alberto Bortoni; Pedestrians to pilots by Brittany Baxter; Improving man-machine partnership using mixed reality social feedback, David Whitney; and Biometrics-based feedback for increasing
rider trust, Aarit Ahuja.

The carmaker plans to add and expand such partnerships in future, whilst also diversifying research assignments for the Hyundai Visionary Challenge to function as a unique open innovation platform. This step is a strategy to use the project as a starting point for mutual research and cooperation with global partners.

With this, Hyundai expects to secure new ideas through partnerships for future technology, expand the human resource network for knowledge exchange, create a sustainable online and mobile-based idea platform, and enhance the brand’s image in the global market.

In July 2017, Hyundai Motor established a global consortium MoU between the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), in an effort to drive further innovation in future mobility.