Ultra wide band integrated optical-and-digital approach for smart factory and perceptive car
Our project addresses one of the main challenges of the “Digital agenda for Europe”, namely “Broadband: digital oxygen for all”. While this strategy is expected to have a significant social and economic impact, the huge instantaneous frequency band to be processed also leads to strong constraints, beyond the specifications of the state-of-the-art digital circuits. 
We propose a multidisciplinary approach that takes advantage of the capabilities and complementary aspects of wireless IR-UWB and UWB-over-fiber technologies to design intelligent, robust and high performance indoor wireless systems, for smart factories and perceptive cars. Thus, by associating UWB waveform optimization, cutting edge signal processing techniques and machine learning algorithms, these green low-cost systems should have the capability to jointly transmit high data rates and provide accurate indoor localization and tracking, as well as to recognize human physiological and behavioral patterns, like vital sign monitoring and gesture recognition. 
The project aims at increasing the safety, security and convenience in Industry 4.0 environments, by multi-humans discrimination/detection, localization and tracking, without the need for them to wear tags or any additional identification equipment. It also aims to contribute to the road safety by preventing the driver drowsiness related accidents and to facilitate the interaction with the perceptive car by hand gesture recognition. 
The fellowship will be hosted by the Lab-STICC Joint research unit CNRS 6285, which brings together the project supervisors from the University of Brest and ENIB. It will also benefits from an international collaboration with the Memorial University of Canada, and an industrial partnership with the ZF Friedrichshafen AG company.