Students from the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT), Pablo Moyano and Enrique Fernández, won the technology challenge launched by FleetBoard, part of the Daimler group, to monitor fleets and improve the experience of Mercedes truck drivers.
The Telecommunications Engineering students took part last weekend in Europe’s largest hackathon, Junction 2018, held in Helsinki, where they competed in the mobility challenges track.
FleetBoard, a Daimler group company, launched the challenge that the UPCT students won. They teamed up with two other young students who are currently working as programmers at Vueling.
“The challenge was to develop an application that could be deployed on the on-board computer of Mercedes-Benz trucks in order to improve the experience of both the driver and the services they use,” Enrique Fernández explained.
The team developed the project TruckSense, an application that captures real-time information from the truck and sends it to a server so machine learning techniques can be applied to predict future data and display all that information graphically in real time through a web application.
As a prize, the team received a three-day trip with accommodation in Stuttgart, the headquarters of the automotive group, where they will attend a workshop on innovative applications and exchange ideas with the engineers who currently develop the company’s truck on-board computer applications.
To take part in Junction 2018, a hackathon where participants had 40 hours to deliver a solution to whichever challenge they chose, the UPCT students had to pass a preselection process that eliminated nearly 9,000 of the 10,000 candidates. They were chosen because of both their programming experience and other personal projects developed through the Free Open Source Club (FOSC) at the university. In fact, this was already the third hackathon award won by Pablo Moyano.
Source: UPCT website Source: La Verdad