PoC Development of a Laser Based and Gesture Controlled HUD

About the Customer:

Our Customer is the subsidiary of a leading manufacturer of off–road vehicles and machineries for Construction, Agriculture and Forestry applications.

Business Challenge:

The customer’s automotive software development team realised the need to integrate a Laser-based Windshield Heads-Up Display solution in their off-road vehicle product line.

The Heads–Up display system had been conceptualized to support a range of features including:

1. Interactive navigation that is controllable through hand gestures,
2. Seamless camera streaming, &
3. Accurate display of live data from the CAN BUS.

However, before kick-starting their production-grade solution development,   the customer realised the gravity of some critical challenges:

• Since the HUD system would be installed in off-road vehicles that operated under varying ambient lighting conditions, visibility of the HUD display was a challenge.
• The HUD solution had to display alerts pertaining to critical vehicle parameters/information on windshield of the off-road vehicle.
  These information alerts included:
  • Vehicle speed.
  • Parking mode.
  • Left and Right Turn Signals.
  • UREA level indicators.
  • Break warnings.
  • Front and rear Power Take-Off.

& many more.

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To confront these challenges successfully, our customer decided to take the PoC development route! It was decided to partner with a reliable technology partner, who can help them with PoC development and testing of the Laser Based Heads-Up Display solution for their off-road vehicles.

Embitel Solution:

At Embitel, our Android Teams already have experience in delivering a production-grade Heads-Up Display for global Automotive customers.

We also have successfully demonstrated capabilities in the areas of J1939 stack development and Android based embedded application development. The customer developed trust in our product development capabilities and decided to partner with our product engineering team, for HUD PoC development.

Our HUD solution development team included the following experts:

• Android Engineer.
• Embedded C Engineers.
• Automotive diagnostic and networking stacks Expert.
• Android Device Driver Development Expert.
• UI/UX developer.
• HUD product development experts.

The following is the snapshot of the PoC development Roadmap for the Gesture Controlled Heads-Up Display:

1. Software and hardware modules evaluation: Consulting services for identification of key software and hardware modules.This was critical in design and development of:
   • Laser based projection of alerts on HUD windshield.
   • Configuration of the CAN BUS messages.
   • Facilitation of the transmission of CAN BUS parameters to the HUD system.
2. Integration and customization of J1939 stack with the HUD system:
   • Configuration of Receive (Rx) and Transmit (Tx) CAN messages between HUD system and J1939 stack.
   • Network management through configuration of CAN Node address HUD on J1939 BUS.
   • Middleware development: For reliable transmission of the vehicle information related to each CAN BUS parameters, the HUD system should be able to communicate with the vehicle ECUs.

   To facilitate this seamless communication between the J1939 bus and the heads-up display unit, a middleware acting as the network management layer was developed.

3. Design and development of User interface elements for the HUD system.
4. Implementation of Hand Gesture-based control interface.
5. Android based application development using Android app framework to ensure that vehicle parameters are appropriately projected on the HUD’s windshield as and when it received the corresponding CAN parameter.
6. Developed a J1939 based Android application layer (basedon an Arm core processor).

Embitel Impact:

Embitel’s domain expertise in automotive HUD product development and innovative technology approach proved to be a great value-add during the customer’s solution development journey:

1. The customer was very pleased with the PoC solution and they now have plans to take the solution from PoC to full-fledged development.
2. Embitel’ s in-house development team helped in eliminating the initial bottlenecks faced by the customer; and successfully developed the PoC solution within a short span of 2-3 months.
3. The PoC solution helped in accelerating the customer‘s in-house R&D efforts. This also provided them with a seamless solution to reduce the overall time to market of their final product.
4. Additionally, usage of re-usable components such as J1939 stack, HUD software stack also helped in reducing the overall PoC development time.

Tools & Technologies:

• Busmaster for simulating vehicle movement.
• Arm core processor.
• Android studio.
• J1939 stack.
• Laser based projector.