EDUARDO CESARPartnership between company and Minas Gerais universities leads to software for assessing automobile dashboardsEDUARDO CESAR
The lights on the dashboard of an automobile should not be too strong or too weak and should provide for color harmony and homogeneity. To assess these items using a scientific methodology, researchers from the federal universities of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and Ouro Preto (UFOP) and from Fiat Automobiles in Betim (Minas Gerais State), developed software that is already helping the company’s engineers to analyze the panels delivered by suppliers, based on the technical specifications of the car manufacturer. The software, which analyzes photos of the dashboards taken in one of the company’s laboratories, is part of the Master’s research degree of engineer Alexandre Faria, from Fiat’s Engineering Center. His supervisors were professors Arnaldo Araújo, from UFMG, and David Menotti, from UFOP. “The system functions like a human neural network, in which the software learns from information taken from a database,” says Alexandre. “We’ve developed mathematical representations for each region on the dashboard,” says David. The study was published in the scientific journal Expert Systems with Applications in March 2012.
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