Case studies

A transatlantic collaboration between Canadian and French companies has resulted in an innovative search engine that responds to shapes rather than text. 10-15% of parts used by designers and manufacturers are duplicates or close duplicates and “new” parts are unnecessarily created because of the time it takes to search in a CAD portal. 3DPartFinder helps designers and manufacturers search for parts, reducing costs and accelerating production. To search, input a model and the search engine displays more than 100 million unique results in 3D in under seven seconds. The application is implemented in a CAD portal for users around the world.

Eureka brought complementary skills together, giving the partners a competitive advantage that resulted in multi-million euro benefits. The project partners are developing an interface for the search engine to work with any component manufacturer, CAD portal or database, and they hope to extend the search engine’s capabilities in other fields.

Funded by Bpifrance and the National Research Council

Issa Rakhodai (ARRIS) witnessed and helped the evolution of television from black and white to analogue, digital, 3D and high definition. He has now realised his goal of developing ultra-high-definition (UHD) broadcasting from our TV sets. His passion for television motivated a collaboration between 16 partners from Belgium, Spain, France and Turkey covering the whole supply chain.

The consortium produced 14 prototypes: they shot film on cameras with a resolution of 4,000 pixels (four times high-definition TV), developed a decoding chipset, four UHD TV sets, a set-top box, encoders, efficient codecs (for digital signals), a super-resolution projector and a 3D TV that doesn’t need glasses.

50 million TV sets have already been sold in a market worth 70 billion US dollars. Participants benefited from the Clusters programme and the opportunity to innovate with partners who are normally their competitors. Participants also expect to further increase market shares and revenue.

Research organisations and companies from Finland, France, Luxembourg, Romania, Spain, Turkey and Korea worked alongside the Finnish Meteorological Institute to research and test in-vehicle information alerts for making driving safer. They developed 23 new products after running pilot tests on cars, buses and trucks in eight countries and in 11 different environments (with several of the tests conducted on icy roads). Data was collected and exchanged between vehicles through on-board sensors, and alerts from weather stations were sent to vehicles directly. This transferred information included road friction and the bursting of an airbag of a vehicle close-by (indicative of approaching an accident). Some of these pilots were showcased in Russia at the Sochi Winter Olympics in February 2014. 

As well as benefitting safety, the technical solutions also helped to cut down congestion in busy cities by gathering data from buses and taxis about traffic jams, accidents and roadworks. The consortium also intends to develop smartphone applications that colour code slippery road surfaces on your journey.  

Rescoll with its Danish partners Biomodics and the Danish Technological Institute developed catheters that prevent bladder infections. With the Spanish Centro Tecnológico Riojano and a large company active in the automotive sector, Rescoll innovated a new type of rubber.

Project funded by: France (bpifrance), Denmark (Innovation fund Denmark), Spain (CDTI)
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Project funded by: ?
Published: 30/01/2018