From KNOW-HOW to WOW

Switching it up! This episode, we’re talking about a person - one person in particular, our company’s founder Robert Bosch. Our host Geoff, a self-declared Bosch fanboy, sits down with Dietrich Kuhlgatz, Director Historical Communications at Bosch. Dietrich brings some treasures, including a diary and actual sound bites from Robert Bosch himself. Meanwhile, co-host Melena has a closer look at the device that was the “big bang” for Bosch, the ignition magneto. This first Bosch bestseller provided the foundation for what the company is today. But what is it?

History of the Bosch-Zünder Magazine

The magneto ignition

Ready for another round? In the second part of our double feature on Vehicle Motion Management, Melena pretends to encounter a moose on the test track, while Shuko gets technical about by-wire technology as one of the enablers of software-controlled vehicle actuators such as brakes, dampers or steering, which can be optimally controlled with the help of Vehicle Motion Management. Bosch expert Philipp Debes performs vigorous maneuvers to demonstrate how this technology helps stabilize vehicles while giving the driver improved control. Bosch product owner Enrico Haberkern returns to discuss how Vehicle Motion Management also has the potential to increase efficiency. Buckle up!

Vehicle Motion Management Part 1:

Aaaaand stop! Ugh, do you know that jolt in your body just before a braking car comes to a complete standstill? That's a thing of the past: Bosch engineers have made it disappear. They use an EV's electric drive to provide extremely smooth, software-controlled braking. This feature, called e-brake to zero, is just one example of how algorithms can improve the driving experience. While Melena tries it out on a test track with Bosch expert Thomas Friedrich, Shuko and Bosch product owner Enrico Haberkern see what else Vehicle Motion Management can do. The core idea is that a driving task is no longer performed by a single actuator, but by an intelligent combination of actuators. Let's get started!

Amazing deal or cheap counterfeit product? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Orgify can authenticate pre-registered products in an instant. This Deep Dive episode offers a closer look at how registration and authentication work. We also look at how the technology enables new ways for brands to get in touch with customers who bought a pre-owned product.

Fake! Or is it? It's getting harder and harder to tell if something is real or not. This applies not only to images or facts, but also to physical goods such as consumer electronics, pharmaceuticals, or luxury watches. Bosch engineer Louis Tepper is part of a team that has developed a solution: Origify is able to scan and recognize the surface of an item based on a simple smartphone image. Melena and Shuko test it. In the process, they learn a lot about the luxury and vintage watch industry. They meet a young Danish watchmaker, Rune Bakkendorff, who builds watches from scratch. Origify, it turns out, could not only help consumers identify counterfeit products, but also help experts authenticate spare parts or industry identify parts too small for serial numbers or QR codes. What time is it? Time to listen to this episode!

www.linkedin.com/showcase/bosch-origify

Generative AI or large vision-language models can improve advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in various ways. Dr. Liu Ren of Bosch Research in Sunnyvale, California, explains how foundation models can help label training data and analyze a bird’s eye view representation of a car’s various data sources to improve the functional performance of ADAS.

Papers:

Chenbin Pan, Burhan Yaman, Tommaso Nesti, Abhirup Mallik, Alessandro G. Allievi, Senem Velipasalar, Liu Ren. "VLP: Vision Language Planning for Autonomous Driving", at CVPR 2024.

Chenbin Pan, Burhan Yaman, Senem Velipasalar, Liu Ren. "CLIP-BEVFormer: Enhancing Multi-View Image-Based BEV Detector with Ground Truth Flow", at CVPR 2024.

Prompt battle! We've all tried giving generative AI chatbots instructions that yield useful results. Recently, GenAI has rapidly expanded across various industries. But can it help drive a car? Dr. Liu Ren, Vice President and Chief Scientist for scalable and assistive AI at Bosch Research, is confident it can. He and his team are at the forefront of integrating foundation models such as large language models or vision-language models with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). In this episode, Liu explains to our hosts, Shuko and Geoff, how the extensive knowledge contained in foundation models can enhance the perception, prediction, and planning capabilities of ADAS. What's even more impressive is that Bosch Research’s approach works despite the constrained resources typical in vehicle environments. As Liu shares his cutting-edge research, Shuko and Geoff go head-to-head in a challenge: Who can craft the cleverest prompts for GenAI?

Credits:

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The OGS, the Optical Gas Spectrometer, is a feat of engineering. In the previous episode, we discussed what it can do and how it works. Today, Bosch associate and OGS inventor Alex Stratmann talks more about turning Raman spectrometers into an industrial product. Many considerations had to be made, from the custom laser source to the material used for the seals, and we also learn that OGS development hasn't stopped: The team is working on a high-pressure version and on efforts to measure almost any gas in the world.

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Take a deep breath. What you just breathed in was probably about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen and some minor other components. But how do you measure that? Measuring gases and their concentrations has been pretty difficult, says Bosch physicist Alex Stratmann. His team’s invention, the optical gas spectrometer, OGS, is set to change that. It packs what used to be a complex lab setup into a tabletop device. OGS leverages Raman spectroscopy, a method that exists for about a 100 years and has been used e.g. in the art world to analyze pigments. Our hosts Melena and Shuko learn from Cristina Aibéo, a chemist at Berlin’s National Museums, how Raman spectroscopy can help solve crimes and also save energy. At Bosch, on the other hand, the OGS helps with measuring hydrogen - and thus with the transition to a green hydrogen economy. Breathe in, breathe out, hit play!

From Know-how to Wow”: How to produce green hydrogen?

Bosch’s interior sensing solutions for vehicles can include a driver and/or occupant-monitoring camera, along with an interior radar. All three have distinct capabilities but together they enable not only reliable safety features, but also new comfort features. Bosch product manager Tyler Warga shares details about how the system works and how it handles difficult situations like changing light conditions or obstructions, e.g. sunglasses. Per usual, your host is Geoff’s voice avatar.

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