Hyundai partners with Brown University to enhance future mobility

The partnership will focus on developing future mobility solutions, which cover biologically inspired mobility, human-machine partnerships, and digital phenotyping. These projects will help position Hyundai as one of the leaders 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 Hyundai’s 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.

80 individuals from 17 teams including professors, undergraduates and graduate students participated in this year’s Visionary Challenge. Four winners were announced at the 3rd Mobility Innovator’s Forum, which took place in Silicon Valley on 16th November. Along with a cash prize the winners receive 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 et al; Pedestrians to Pilots by Brittany Baxter et al; Improving Man-Machine Partnership Using Mixed Reality Social Feedback, David Whitney et al; and Biometrics-based Feedback for Increasing Rider Trust, Aarit Ahuja et al.

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

With this, the company 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.

Last year in July, 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.