Metrology plays a vital role in road safety, intelligent lighting, and automotive sensing. In this interview, Paola Lacomussi shares her journey from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) to INRIM, highlighting how measurement science drives innovation in mobility. From optimizing road lighting to redefining automotive sensing, she discusses key research initiatives and the crucial link between metrology and real-world applications.
Can you tell us about your journey from working at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) to joining INRIM? What motivated the shift and how has your experience fed into your current role?
I started my career immediately after graduation at FIAT Research Centre (Formerly CRF, currently a Research Centre of the Stellantis group) in the early nineties. At that time CRF was one of most brilliant Research Centre of Torino neighborhood, together with Telecom Research Centre and National Metrology Institute INRIM (Formerly IEN) where I currently work. After only two years, I moved from CRF (FCA) to INRIM (formerly IEN) the National Metrology Institute (NMI) of Italy. My move was motivated by my desire for a more challenging and interdisciplinary environment and marked a significant shift from industry-focused research to large social impact research, towards the National Metrology Research. Doing research in an NMI allows me to delve into the intricate interactions between light, observers, and materials with direct social benefit impact. While my primary focus has been on road lighting and road materials, I have also made substantial contributions to the illumination of cultural heritage sites. Both areas demand strict regulatory compliance to ensure safety, whether for road users or for the preservation of valuable cultural artifacts and deep knowledge of material photometric properties..
My industrial experience at FCA instilled in me a practical, results-oriented mindset, emphasizing that research outcomes must have tangible, real-world applications. While at INRIM, I have further honed my skills, achieving the highest level of expertise in measurement and uncertainty evaluation. This role requires meticulous attention to detail, identifying all influencing variables and conditions to understand their impact on final results. In contrast, industrial research often prioritizes production tolerances over rigorous uncertainty principles due to time and strategic constraints. Now, with 30 years of experience, I now offer a unique perspective that integrates both approaches. In applied research, it is crucial to balance the precision and rigor of metrology with practicality efficiency of industrial methodologies. Neglecting either aspect would compromise the effectiveness and relevance of the work.
How does metrology contribute to improving road safety in the automotive sector?
Metrology plays a crucial role in a lot of different fields, automotive sector included: Metrology together with Standardization provide a Quality Infrastructure for producing goods, services and systems in the best way possible, while ensuring safety and quality. Metrology ensures that measurements are reliable, comparable, and accurate and provides the means and instruments for standardization.
Road safety is obviously improved by better automotive dedicated metrology, able to ensure accurate and reliable measurements of vehicles performances, including sensing systems, road infrastructure and materials, and driver’s perception: perception of all drivers, human and automated systems too. However, this is only achievable through a rigorous methodological approach, supported by the contributions of National Metrology Institutes (NMIs) and by Reference Observers representative of the actual driver’s perception and needs. Currently, only human based Reference Observers are available for automotive: CIE Reference Observers for photometry and road applications are standardized observers representative of human perception and human driver geometrical position.
Despite they can be foreseen as a kind of driver, vehicles sensing systems are significantly dissimilar from human drivers, from the point of view of perception and geometrical position, but they do not have a dedicated metrology nor a robust reference. By defining limit values for safety-critical parameters and ensuring these parameters are measured using trustworthy, standardized and optimized processes for automotive sector, metrology, supported by NMIs structure, ensures that vehicles, infrastructure, and regulations converge to create safer mobility systems for all road users
What role will intelligent lighting play in the future of mobility?
Intelligent lighting will play a pivotal role in the future of mobility by enhancing safety, efficiency, and sustainability. We have just gone through a phase known as LEDification in which LED sources have intoxicated all designer’s work, almost as if the watchword was LED-it! At that time (more than 15 years ago) a dedicated metrology for LED was not available, nor there were reliable LED sources: lighting designers just substituted traditional lamps with LED lamps in the same luminaires, but obviously this was not the right approach despite the tremendous energy savings. The available metric for predicting color and visual perception, especially glare, were not optimized for LED, as well as the luminaires. By the years a dedicated metrology and quantities for performance evaluation were developed, and currently LED spectrum, luminaires and lighting design are finally optimized. Thanks to LEDification Adaptive Lighting systems are available: by dedicated sensing systems, road lighting dynamically adjusts to environmental conditions, traffic situations, and the needs of different users, ensuring in all conditions the optimal visibility for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike.
In the context of autonomous vehicles and smart cities, intelligent lighting will go beyond illumination and several options are currently on the table: communication between vehicles, infrastructure, and road users. As well intelligent automotive lighting system can adapt to road environment, the so called AFS (Adaptive Front Light Systems) for which I contributed to defining the regulatory requirements back in 1998, or the new digital headlamps that can alter their beam to avoid dazzling oncoming drivers.
Moreover, these systems will contribute to energy efficiency, sustainability and road safety. But again, if they can benefit from new, robust and reliable metrology, optimized for automotive digital sensors, the benefits will be even stronger.
As someone who has led large-scale research initiatives including the EU-funded SURFACE project and your current role in the CIE group, can you share any recent outcomes or trends from recent projects?
I led the European funded research project SURFACE, whose task was to develop the Metrology of Road Surfaces for standardization applications in road lighting. The SURFACE project focused on improving the characterization of road surfaces reflectance behavior to optimize road lighting systems design, a crucial factor for both safety and energy conservation. It developed new reference geometries and photometric data representative of modern road materials, addressing deficiencies in outdated standards and references used at the design stage. For instance, the project introduced optimized observation angles, tailored to actual traffic conditions, including suggestions for autonomous driving, to improve visibility for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians, while reducing energy consumption. The creation of 3D printed reference materials (patented) and open-access tools like the Lumcorun software has advanced measurement accuracy and uncertainty evaluation in road lighting design, providing a foundation for revising key standards like the EN 13201 series. Currently I’m Associated Chair of CIE Technical Committee 4-50, a CIE group that is committed to reuse the outcomes of SURFACE project by publish the new reference document for Road Surface and Road Marking characterization. This document stresses the need of metrology and accuracy in road surface and road markings characterization and clearly explain instruments, methods and procedures for measurements, providing a useful guidance for the whole community of road related materials researchers.
In parallel, I also worked on Trustworthy smart mobility to emphasize the importance of metrology in ensuring the reliability of data from digital sensors in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Key objectives include establishing calibration frameworks, addressing sensor degradation, and defining methodologies for managing uncertainties in data fusion processes. These efforts align with the European Green Deal’s goals by enhancing safety and reducing emissions in the transportation sector. Currently NMIs are engaged in the topic and calibration services and testing facilities are being developed.
Overall, these initiatives highlight the critical role that metrology plays in mobility, from improving standards to defining the characteristics of safer, more reliable automotive sensors.
Are there any exciting upcoming research projects you can tell us about?
While I was leading the SURFACE project, it became clear to me that there was a huge lack in the automotive metrology approach: everything is human related. But driving is not anymore a human activity only.
Traditionally, all normative requirements and CIE reference conditions for road environments—such as lighting design, visibility models, and signaling performances—assume that driving is a visual task performed by a human driver. Standards are based on the CIE standard photometric observer, which models a human’s ability to perceive and act upon the road environment within a specific response time and under given conditions of adaptation.
However, this approach is becoming outdated as driving is no longer solely a human visual task. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles increasingly rely on vision-based sensors and digital detectors, which are not bound by human limitations. The reliance on the human visual system constrains the development of road infrastructure, signaling, and ADAS functionality.
That said, I shared my vision with several experts from Academia, Industry, and regulations, and we created a working group called BELLAROMA (BEtter Live LAboratory ROad MArkings) to investigate new approaches to road marking characterization and modeling. At the same time, I proposed to CIE the establishment of a new reference observer for road applications to redefine how road and signaling safety can be perceived by new digital automotive sensors.
The proposed CIE group RF06-Toward a New CIE Non-Biological Reference Observer, aims to overcome standards limitations of referring only to a human reference observer, by creating a new standard observer tailored to the capabilities of digital detection systems. This observer would redefine measurement and reference conditions, moving beyond the visible spectrum to include radiometric sensing, and better align with the needs of automated systems. The initiative seeks to optimize road marking and signaling from a non-human perspective, ensuring compatibility with emerging technologies while enhancing safety and functionality.
This research will involve a multidisciplinary effort, engaging metrology institutions, manufacturers, and standardization bodies. Obviously, if next gen road materials and systems performances will be optimized -also- for the digital ADAS/AV sensors, performance and safety of the whole road environment will dramatically increase and the full potential of smart mobility systems could be implemented by aligning testing and performances with actual automotive set-up and systems.
In your opinion, how can events like AutoSens help bridge the gap between scientific research and real-world automotive applications? How do you envision contributing to the community?
As an expert in metrology for road environment, material characterization and digital sensors, I believe that events like AutoSens are valuable in bridging the gap between scientific research and real-world applications. AutoSens is a collaborative community where academia and automotive technology leaders can meet and converge. The academic community must always keep industrial needs in mind, but also the industrial community must not only follow production and marketing-oriented approaches. Autosens is the perfect place to exchange knowledge, align goals and promote innovation.
I want to share my latest experience I had at AutoSens Barcelona, October 2024: I coordinated a panel involving several experts in automotive sensing. Some were experts in design and development of sensors for automotive applications, while others were more related to manufacturing of vehicles equipped with those sensors. The discussion involved our three points of view on automotive sensing: performance parameters and KPIs (sensor development), tolerances (vehicle manufacturing), and trustworthiness (uncertainty and reliability in metrology). Three sides of the same coin, so to speak. I think that panel was a very good example of what it means to be part of the Autosens community and what it means to engage with researchers, manufacturers, and industry.
AutoSens is accelerating Innovation by ensuring networking between researchers, industry, automotive/data services, stakeholders and let me say, metrologists too. I figure AutoSens like a sort of a soil that can be fed by the different expertise to partnerships that drive the translation of theoretical advancements into commercially viable technologies. As metrologist I will bring new perspectives but also uncomfortable questions, like: are sensor’s data trustworthy? What is the uncertainty and how is it affected by the road environment? But I will bring answers as well, with the commitment of increasing awareness on the reliability of sensors output and uncertainty, sharing and advancing metrological practices and knowledge in the automotive and road environment sensing.
