When sponsorship becomes a technical experiment: the 4LTrophyx adventure
February 2025, the 4LTrophyx team, made up of two students from École Polytechnique, contacted us looking for sponsors to participate in the 4L Trophy. They needed around €1,000 to get started.
The project seemed far removed from our activities. We don't have any clients in the automotive industry. Recruiting engineers from prestigious universities is not one of our priorities. As for communicating in the middle of the Moroccan desert, the impact on our brand awareness seems limited.
But the budget is affordable, and the two students are convincing. All that remains is to find an area of collaboration that is useful for everyone: installing a measurement or data processing system in their 4L?
Ideas for collaboration
We are looking for a simple, robust system that is compatible with the availability of a team whose priority is the race. A few ideas have emerged:-
A dashcam
Interest: testing autonomous equipment in an unusual environment may meet the needs of our customers in relation to our video monitoring activities.
Difficulty: complex installation and significant data volume management, which may distract students from their main objective: the race. -
Rugged network equipment
Interest: testing equipment intended for outdoor industrial environments in real-world conditions. A recent project showed us how a poor choice of equipment can have negative consequences on the availability of a network deployed outdoors.
Difficulty: definition of the use case, power supply and test scenarios to be specified, overall size of the assembly in a 4L/ -
Simple autonomous sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes
Interest: explore the collection of environmental data, an area that is still relatively unexplored in our country. These sensors, once reserved for motor racing or the America's Cup, are now accessible and present in most smartphones
Difficulty: low – current sensors are robust, energy efficient, and easily integrated into a vehicle. They produce manageable volumes of information using the means at hand.
We therefore chose this third option. After some research, two models of accelerometers that were economical and easy to administer were identified. The 4LTrophyx team successfully installed them and conducted conclusive experiments.
Some lessons learned
- Students at prestigious universities demonstrate a remarkable ability to design, prototype, and implement projects.
- Beyond communication, sponsorship can become a testing ground for technical experimentation, providing valuable feedback.
- Environmental sensors are now accessible, robust, and connectable using various protocols, opening the way to multiple uses.
Vehicle instrumentation
Four key factors emerge: sensor positioning, energy consumption, data collection, and technical characteristics.
Sensor positioning
The sensors chosen were sensitive to the presence of metal objects, which was obviously not ideal in a 4L! In theory, the vehicle is a rigid assembly and the sensor can be placed in any position to deduce the movement of the whole. In practice, the environment, vibration, presence of metal mass, bulk, and amplitude of movements generated all matter.
Data collection
This is an important point: recording time and sampling frequency must be adjusted according to need, memory card size, or connectivity to an external collection point.
Sensor measurement performance
- Measurement range
- Accuracy and stability
- Bandwidth
- Sampling frequency
Vehicle accelerometry applications
The full project report, available below, highlights four applications of accelerometry in the transportation sector:
- GPS-free positioning and route tracking assistance
- Driving behavior analysis and driving assistance
- Detection of mechanical faults through vehicle behavior analysis
- Road condition assessment and surface anomaly detection
The 4LTrophyx team focused primarily on the first of these avenues. To go further, the positioning of the sensors and the collection and analysis of data will need to be refined. But this initial experiment is already proving very promising.
