Press and media

The digitalization of value chains is advancing very rapidly. For the automotive industry in particular, Catena-X and similar projects are creating new data ecosystems with the associated services, apps and connectors. Such data ecosystems only scale if many participants provide or use data. In this case, the focus is on SMEs as Germany's industrial backbone. To ensure that the transformation gains momentum along the entire supply chain and not just among OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, SMEs must be more closely involved. Transfer-X was especially launched for this purpose: Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action with around 8 million euros, the transfer project will create a web-based knowledge platform for easy-to-understand information and training materials - with the aim of motivating and empowering SMEs to participate in the digital transformation of value chains.

* Robots should remediate contaminated sites as autonomously as possible and support the dismantling of nuclear facilities as well as the recovery of hazardous materials: This is the objective of ROBDEKON, a competence center funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

* After four years of defining detailed use cases, researching technological principles, and developing demonstrators, the focus in phase II is now on transferring the results into practice and making the center permanent.

* Therefore, ROBDEKON is looking for partners for pilot projects – i. e. companies that want to offer and/or use autonomous decontamination technology.

Robots should perform decontamination tasks as independently as possible in environments that are hostile to humans, e.g. in the remediation of contaminated sites or in the dismantling of nuclear facilities and the decontamination of power plant components – with the aim of allowing humans to stay out of the danger zone. This vision was at the beginning of ROBDEKON. Now, the first, four-year funding phase of the competence center has been completed and various systems waiting for their evaluation in the field have been developed. These systems are able to measure contamination, handle hazardous substances, or autonomously remove contaminated layers of soil.

Making production processes that are still immature quickly usable with the help of artificial intelligence: This is the goal of an alliance of researchers from KIT and Fraunhofer IOSB, which has now been granted extensive funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) within the framework of the strategic AI funding initiative. This will help to further combine the research fields of AI and engineering in the context of industrial production and to advance the scientific activity in the newly opened Karlsruhe Research Factory.