The startup created by the Técnico alumnus Luís Rita – CycleAI – won the Building the Future Hackathon and a €3000 prize. The team developed an autonomous micromobility driving solution adapted to electric bike models and stood out among more than 100 participants.

“Winning a competition is highly motivating. It ends up working as the external validation of a new idea or project. Furthermore, this would boost the visibility of sponsors, such as Microsoft and Galp”, says Miguel Peliteiro, co-founder of CycleAI.

“We started to work early, from the ideation process to the development of the solution, and managed to create an interesting proposition for mentors and jury”, explains Miguel Peliteiro. “People are the key to a successful idea. This unlocks many doors, widens horizons and adds a lot of value to the project”, he adds.

The Hackathon was organised by Microsoft, Galp, GoWithFlow and TAIKAI, and was part of the Building the Future annual event, both held as fully virtual events. The participants were challenged to present innovative solutions on Electric Mobility in four areas, including for example: Exploit the potential of V2G/V2H applications that enable the energy stored in electric vehicles to be fed back into the grid or home respectively; engaging microgrid and e-mobility users to share data on profiles and patterns; designing the right infrastructure for shared electric mobility from bikes to cars; or develop blockchain applications that can add value to this sector.

Luís Rita explains, “autonomous micromobility driving was the easiest way to adapt what already existed in CycleAI to this challenge”. “The idea comes from a new member of our team, Gonçalo Moreno, who developed his master’s thesis on this topic and the whole team agreed that this was the right way forward”, says the alumnus.

“We already had a safety map, previously developed by Codrin Bostan, which gives us information about the most dangerous places for cycling. Then, we deployed an original Machine Learning model on Azure, together with a business model that we had never used”, explains Luís Rita.

It should also be recalled that CycleAI aims to improve cyclist safety using algorithms that help to map risk points. For the success of the project and in order to improve road safety for cyclists, everyone’s participation in the perception poll is crucial.