Zenseact believes in making the world a better place by protecting all life on the road. The only way to achieve this is by making software so smart and safe that it will secure the wellbeing of all life inside a moving car and outside of it. Our goal is to create a safe software for self-driving cars that will enable the end customers to reach a “Zen” state of mind. At Zenseact, we have a strong heritage within safety. We originate from Volvo Cars, arguably the safest car brand in the world, and from Zenuity, who delivered a series of world-first safety innovations. To fully serve our purpose, we are creating an unsupervised autonomous vehicle solution for consumer vehicles together with our lead customer Volvo Cars. Currently, we are a proud provider of trusted Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and next generation Autonomous Drive (AD) features for consumer vehicles.

Reaching a “Zen” state for the driver requires extensive knowledge of the future driving conditions and capabilities, but also understanding the status of the driver. For us, MEDIATOR is an inevitable step further in this direction. MEDIATOR and the partnership in this project will enrich our understanding of how to “mediate” and increase safety for the vehicle users, and other road users by judging the fitness of the vehicle considering environmental factors (e.g., road type, traffic, weather), the driver fitness considering driver state (e.g., drowsiness, distraction) but also driver comfort. Our contribution to MEDIATOR is the conceptualization, development, and evaluation of the so-called automation state component – a component that is able to predict the availability and fitness of the vehicle automation. Zenseact is also involved in other activities, like the conceptualization of driving context and decision logic component, but also in the prototype development.

Zenuity joined the MEDIATOR project from the start. After the split of the company in summer 2020, Veoneer and Zenseact joined as partners to take over the tasks from Zenuity. Since the project was already ongoing with its tight deadlines, it was challenging to take over the activities and deliver everything in time. Additionally, we have joined the project in times of the pandemic, where physical meetings are discouraged. Despite these challenges, we have managed to keep regular communication with related partners and pushed the boundaries to deliver our tasks and collaborate with partners to make our real-world prototype happen. We have delivered a first version of the automation state component towards the goal of having a ready prototype with corresponding project partners by May 2022 in order to conduct the user evaluation study, if we can continue to keep the good communication alive and to integrate solutions across partners in time.