DICV Inaugurates Mechatronics Lab in Chennai

Mumbai, Aug 19 (PTI) Commercial vehicle maker DICV on Monday announced the inauguration of a mechatronics lab at its Oragadam manufacturing facility in Chennai.

The newly set up lab would help the company accelerate product innovation and development of new software architecture of vehicles, Daimler Commercial Vehicles (DICV) said in a statement.

Testing and verification process time will now be reduced significantly, resulting in a 70-80 per cent reduction in cost with significant improvements in software feature functionality verification and validation for trucks and buses, the company said.

Also, new technologies can be verified and validated before in-vehicle testing, it added.

"Our new Mechatronics Lab signals a transformative phase in our Research and Development operations. Beyond validation, the lab also serves as a hub for innovation, positioning us uniquely on the global stage," said Pradeep Kumar Thimmaiyan, President of Product Engineering & Chief Technology Officer at Daimler India Commercial Vehicles.

The lab's infrastructure includes a flashing station for pre-production verification of all ECUs (electronic control units), ensuring hardware and software compatibility before production, thereby minimising errors and reducing the need for re-releases, the company said.

The ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) setup allows on-road data to be reproduced in the lab, aiding initial software modifications and reducing vehicle dependency, saving time and cost, it noted.

The lab also enables safe verification of Driver State Monitoring (DSM), avoiding risky in-vehicle trials.

"Our lab can verify and validate around 300 features, encompassing over a thousand signals within 10 days, and can verify 600 fault codes in a developing product in just a few weeks, which otherwise would have taken months.

"Our aim is to ensure our software architecture gets verified and validated before it gets embedded in our trucks and buses as early identification of software bugs, which saves enormous developmental cost," said Dilip Shrivastava, Head of Mechatronics and Software Technology at DICV.