Open Innovation Autonomous Vehicle Development and Testing Platform (OPINA)

Today, rapidly developing technologies enable the car parts to communicate with each other and to be controlled by software. While this development paves the way for the driverless vehicle period, it also leads the transformation of the automotive sector from design to production.

Istanbul Okan University, one of the locomotives in the automotive sector for Turkey to capture this change and to contribute to the development of the sector in our country, has developed the Open Innovation Autonomous Vehicle Development and Testing Platform Project, referred as OPINA in short. The project aims to establish an innovation platform and to contribute to the production of advanced technology software and hardware by bringing together all the stakeholders of the automotive industry on this platform.

One of the most important features of the platform to be established within the scope of OPINA is the opportunity to collaborate remotely from different institutions and organizations. In this way, researchers and software developers will be able to test new software architectures and hardware integrations by learning from each other to develop autonomous and communicating vehicle software. In this context, it is aimed to establish at least 2 research and new product developments within the scope of the project. Thanks to these partnerships, at least 1 international and regional patents and 4 national patent applications are expected at the end of the project.

OPINA will also enable the evaluation of the performance of these new products developed for autonomous vehicles with a new simulation system in different road, weather and traffic conditions. In this way, the development processes of autonomous vehicle projects will accelerate and the competitiveness of the sector in the international market will increase.

In addition to these efforts, activities such as trainings and mentoring that will contribute to the advanced and competitive technology development of the region, creating new research projects, developing innovative products, patent applications, establishing entrepreneurial firms and creating funds will also be carried out in the OPINA Project. In this context, OPINA will lead the establishment of 5 innovative businesses.