Expert Project Engineer - Technical Project Management

Magna develops leather alternative made with apples and recycled materials for car seats. Car interiors could become more sustainable thanks to a new seating material developed using bio-based... Car interiors could become more sustainable thanks to a new seating material developed using bio-based ingredients including apple by-products alongside recycled content. Automotive technology supplier Magna has unveiled a next-generation seating surface designed to offer the premium appearance and feel associated with traditional leather while meeting the demanding durability requirements of modern vehicles. The new material has been developed specifically for automotive seats and could give manufacturers another option as they look to increase the proportion of recycled and bio-based materials used in new cars. Importantly for drivers and manufacturers, Magna says the material has been engineered to deliver more than environmental benefits. It has been designed to withstand the wear, temperature changes and demanding everyday conditions experienced by vehicle interiors. Designed to look and feel like leather. Magna says its new seating surface can closely replicate the appearance and feel of traditional leather while offering manufacturers considerable freedom over interior design. A broad selection of colours, grains and perforation patterns can be produced, allowing individual car manufacturers to tailor the material to different models and interior specifications. The company has also focused on visual consistency and wear resistance, helping the material maintain the premium appearance expected in higher-specification vehicle interiors. One of the more unusual ingredients is material derived from apple by-products, which forms part of the bio-based content used alongside recycled materials. However, developing a sustainable material that looks attractive is only part of the challenge. Any alternative destined for mass-produced cars must also be practical to manufacture on a large scale. Magna says its new material has therefore been designed to work within existing automotive seating production environments, helping manufacturers integrate it without requiring completely new production processes. There could also be manufacturing efficiencies compared with natural leather. According to Magna, the more consistent nature of the material has the potential to improve cutting utilisation and, in certain production configurations, increase cutting yield. This could help manufacturers reduce the amount of material wasted when producing seat covers. Kristof Kurzeja, Director of Advanced Engineering at Magna Seating, said: "Materials incorporating alternative feedstocks are viable for vehicle programs only when they meet the required performance and production criteria. "Our focus is on developing materials that incorporate bio-based or recycled inputs while meeting automotive application requirements." Part of Magna's EcoSphere seating strategy. The new material forms part of Magna's wider EcoSphere seating portfolio, which explores ways of increasing recycled, bio-based and alternative materials within vehicle interiors. Other developments include seating incorporating recycled foams and mono-material seat cover concepts. The latter are intended to make different materials easier to separate when a vehicle reaches the end of its useful life. Magna is also working on lightweight seat structures and designs intended to reduce the quantity of raw material required during manufacturing. Taken together, the technologies are designed to help vehicle manufacturers meet targets around recycled content, material efficiency and vehicle weight while maintaining the comfort, appearance and durability motorists expect. The development also illustrates how the move towards more sustainable cars is extending beyond engines and batteries. As manufacturers examine the environmental impact of the entire vehicle, materials used for seats, dashboards, carpets, trim and other interior components are increasingly becoming another area for innovation. Magna's apple-based and recycled seating surface could ultimately give manufacturers another way of creating premium-looking interiors without relying solely on traditional leather.

NVIDIA Isaac ROS 5.0 advances agentic, Open Source Robotics Development. 22/09/2026 To build and deploy sophisticated robotics applications that can perceive, reason and act in dynamic environments, developers need new physical AI models and tools. The ROS open framework is a project from Open Robotics that helps humans build robots. NVIDIA Isaac ROS 5.0 - a collection of GPU-accelerated packages built on ROS, released today at the ROSCon conference in Toronto, Canada - helps humans and AI agents build robots together. The release introduces new agentic workflows and platform support to help developers build, customize and deploy robotics applications faster. ROS provides the open source foundation for much of modern robotics development, giving developers common tools, libraries and standards for building and connecting robot applications. NVIDIA Isaac ROS brings NVIDIA accelerated computing, physical AI models and production-ready libraries to the nearly 1.3 million ROS users, helping developers build high-performance robotics applications using free, familiar, open source tools. Bringing AI Agents Into Robotics Development AI agents are changing how software is built, helping developers automate repetitive tasks, navigate complex codebases and move from ideas to working applications faster. Isaac ROS 5.0 brings these capabilities to robotics development. Isaac ROS 5.0 introduces support for ROS Lyrical and Ubuntu 24.04, giving developers a path to adopt the latest ROS platform while continuing to accelerate demanding robotics workloads with NVIDIA accelerated computing. NVIDIA worked with the Open Source Robotics Alliance to contribute a standard data-handling interface to ROS Lyrical that helps robotics software work efficiently across different computing hardware, including GPUs. Available to the entire ROS community, it gives developers a consistent way to accelerate demanding robotics applications, with CUDA providing a working example for GPU acceleration. New NVIDIA Isaac skills for setup and manipulation provide reusable workflows that developers and AI agents can use to complete robotics development tasks. Agent-ready documentation also makes it easier for AI agents to understand Isaac ROS tools and workflows, turning developer intent into working applications faster. Some skills go beyond assisting with individual coding tasks. A new FoundationStereo fine-tuning skill enables an AI agent to help adapt a stereo perception model to a developer's cameras, environment and robotics application, so developers can easily achieve more accurate perception for a given sensor configuration. FoundationPose, a foundation model for object pose estimation and tracking, now provides an agent-ready inference library that enables robots to perceive and track the position and orientation of objects up to 5.5x faster. In addition, pick and place - a common workflow that connects detection, depth estimation and pose output - is now available as a standalone, agent-ready skill, providing robot developers more flexibility beyond Isaac ROS. Accelerating the Open Source Robotics Ecosystem The robotics ecosystem is already extending this agentic approach to development workflows. AgenticROS, an open source project sponsored by 3D perception technology company RealSense, connects Isaac ROS with NVIDIA Nemotron open models and NVIDIA NemoClaw blueprints, enabling AI agents to interact with ROS-based robots. RealSense is also optimizing its latest AI-native 3D stereo depth cameras, including RealSense D585 Pro, and an open source software development kit for Isaac ROS and the NVIDIA Jetson Thor edge AI platform, helping developers build perception, navigation and manipulation applications. Intrinsic's Open Machine Tending Solution is a reference application for computer numerical control machine tending, part of the newly released Intrinsic Core, an open source suite of preconfigured runtime services and capabilities designed to accelerate industrial robotics applications. It includes built-in compatibility with NVIDIA FoundationPose for out-of-the-box object registration, tracking and pose estimation. Using the FoundationPose perception pipeline, the solution enables robots to dynamically detect and handle parts while reducing the need for rigid, costly physical fixtures and specialized systems integration. Intrinsic uses FoundationPose to perform seamless object perception in its Open Machine Tending Solution. Seeed Studio is using NVIDIA Isaac ROS with reBot Arm, combining accelerated perception, spatial understanding and motion planning on NVIDIA Jetson Thor. This integration gives developers a practical platform for building adaptable physical AI applications, from object localization to collision-aware manipulation and autonomous pick and place. Magna is using NVIDIA Isaac ROS as a modular, GPU-accelerated foundation for robotic perception, synchronized data collection and NVIDIA Isaac GR00T model deployment, pairing it with Isaac Sim hardware-in-the-loop testing to bring intelligent automation from research to real-world manufacturing and mobility - faster and with fewer risks. Magna pairs Isaac ROS with Isaac Sim for hardware-in-the-loop testing for faster deployment. Prefix.dev's Pixi package-management tool makes it easier to create reproducible robot development environments, bringing together ROS with the NVIDIA CUDA platform to help developers more easily set up and share accelerated robotics workflows. As an Isaac ROS Partner, Foxglove helps developers visualize and debug live ROS applications through its web and desktop tools, which are integrated throughout Isaac ROS tutorials and support data such as 3D topics, nvblox meshes and rosbags. Flexiv is integrating Isaac ROS with its Rizon 4 adaptive robot, giving developers access to NVIDIA-accelerated robotics capabilities and a streamlined path from testing applications in NVIDIA Isaac Si

Sanctuary is on a mission to create the world's first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots that will help us work more safely, efficiently, and sustainably, helping to address the labour challenges facing many organizations today.