Indian students showcase innovative ideas at Daimler Hackathon

More than 50 programming and car enthusiastic ‘hackers’ participated at the Daimler hackathon in Bangalore and developed digital prototypes associated with Daimler’s strategic focus CASE. CASE stands for connected, autonomous, shared & service and electric drive.

In total, more than 350 teams from India applied for the hackathon. The top 11 teams have been invited – among them students of India’s leading engineering and IT universities. In close cooperation with Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India (MBRDI) they created convincing solutions within just 24 hours.

The winning team ‘V1’ developed a prototype, which helps vehicles to detect pedestrians with infrared. (R-L): Aadi Jain, Anmol Singhal, Saurabh Manish Raje, Nischay Singh and Manu Saale, CEO, MBRDI.

The winning team ‘V1’ developed a prototype, which helps vehicles to detect pedestrians with infrared. The team ‘V1’ now has the possibility to present their idea to increase road safety at the Mobile World congress 2018 in Barcelona. Furthermore, the winning team was rewarded with a cash prize of Rs 150,000. Team Drive Autonomous was rewarded second place for their idea ‘Economical Hardware Upgrade Kit for Autonomous Driving’. With the idea ‘Connected Charging – the Shared Approach’ team ‘Potential Patrons’ made the third place. Additionally, the team ‘Pearson Spectre’ was honored with a special prize for their technical innovative approach ‘Linked Car’ on the subject of connectivity.

The participants worked on creative ideas in digitalisation.

The hackathon in Bangalore took place January 19-20 and is the last event of the current hackathon series by Daimler’s DigitalLife Campus. In total, more than 200 students and IT-experts participated in 2017 and 2018. Selected teams of the hackathon series from Germany, Singapore and India will go to the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona. There, the winning teams of the Hack.IAA, Hack.Singapore, Hack.Berlin, Hack.TechCrunch and Hack.Bangalore have the possibility to present and discuss their ideas with experts at the startup business convention 4FYN.

Markus Hägele, Head of DigitalLife@Daimler, responsible for the company’s digital transformation said: “The outstanding ideas of the nominated teams deserve to be discussed with specialists and a big audience at the Mobile World Congress.”

Since 2016 Daimler organizes its hackathon series called DigitalLife Campus. In total, 10 events with more than 500 participants on three continents took place working on ideas in the field of digitalisation. The events are organized by the team DigitalLife@Daimler that promotes and realises projects concerning the digital transformation across the company.