With an intent to establish the largest technology centre outside of Sweden, Volvo Group today inaugurated its new Vehicle Tech Lab at its Bengaluru campus in India.

Located in the software capital's Bagmane Tech Park in CV Raman Nagar, the new tech lab will have a virtual reality zone, a driving simulator, a 3D printing machine for prototyping, a live mock-up chassis space and an electromobility zone for development of power electronics for EVs.

The centre is an extension of Volvo's existing Global Truck Technology (GTT) R&D centre in the country, which has been operational since 1998, and is slated for its silver jubilee next year.

The Volvo Vehicle Tech Lab will focus on new product development across the different technological areas of the company's global range of trucks and will drive innovation in ergonomics, kinematics, cable routing design, electrification and safety system design among others.

Volvo has partnered with tech giants Meta and PTC for its virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) solutions that will enable it to create a digital twin of a truck for doing assessments and virtual experiments before going towards the physical development of a new technological solution.

Volvo says Meta has worked on a custom-made technology called 'Passthrough' specifically for Volvo that allows it to drive innovation in XR — a virtual space that gets overlayed over a physical scenario — and ensures the human is able to see both virtual as well as the real surroundings, something which is unavailable in a pure-VR system.

Leveraging 5G, IoT tech to drive innovation

The tech lab in Bengaluru will also collaborate with Volvo's other labs in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is also the company's headquarters, as well as in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the US, to drive innovation on the company's latest range of FH all-electric trucks.

Volvo is deploying a collaborative virtual workspace (CVW) by using cloud-based, 5G-enabled virtual reality headsets from Meta that are enabling its collaboration in the digital world. By leveraging 5G technology, the tech centre aims at seamless collaboration with its global teams with minimal latency.

The new lab will lay a major focus on e-trucks of the Volvo Group, which has globally already delivered 72 units of the new FH and has 184 units lined up for delivery by end-2022.

The Volvo Tech Lab in Bengaluru will focus on tapping into the IoT-enabled solutions in these trucks and by the use of XR technology, remotely monitor the vehicles' digital twins for troubleshooting issues and making design improvements.

The Volvo Group intends the new Vehicle Tech Lab to be a playground for its over 1,700 software and hardware engineers working in Bengaluru to drive innovation in the global Volvo trucks product line up, including upcoming electrified and fuel-cell electric trucks. 

The lab is also in the stages of deploying a powder-based 3D printer that would be used for prototyping and be sustainable by offering reusability of the non-plastic-based raw material.