Press releases and news

* 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.

The quality of industrial production processes is ensured by a large number of sensor-based individual inspections. This generates large amounts of data. However, until now, the information from the individual sensors has generally only been looked at in isolation. The AutoInspect solution from the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB overcomes this issue by linking all of the data to create a consolidated overview. Now, for the first time, linking the measured values is facilitating intelligent evaluation and the detection of hidden faults. This increases efficiency and ultimately improves product quality. A demonstrator will be presented at the Hannover Messe 2022 from May 30 to June 2 at the joint Fraunhofer booth in Hall 5, Booth A06.

We are pleased to announce the release of our open-source software FA³ST Service v0.1.0 as first building block of the Fraunhofer Advanced Asset Administration Shell Tools for Digital Twins (FA³ST). FA³ST Service enables you to create and run Digital Twins based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) specification by Plattform Industrie 4.0 that can be interacted with via standard-conform APIs.

Artificial intelligence is regularly applied in areas such as image analysis and speech recognition. However, in the industrial production sector its potential is still scarcely used. Several Fraunhofer institutes have recently developed a solution as part of the lighthouse project “ML4P — Machine Learning for Production”, which aims to make industrial manufacturing much more efficient through the use of machine learning. The software suite is very flexible and can be easily applied in existing production processes.

The rapid transfer of theoretical knowledge into profitable industrial applications and services: with this guiding principle, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft are conducting joint research in the Karlsruhe Research Factory at the KIT East Campus. The digitalization of production and the possibilities of artificial intelligence are the focus of the research work, which is based on close cooperation with industrial partners. The partners opened the new development and demonstration center today (March 28, 2022) together with Baden-Württemberg's Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann, Science Minister Theresia Bauer, and Economics Minister Dr. Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut, and around 400 representatives from politics, science, and industry.

Mobility services offer people a variety of ways to get from A to B. Whether bus and train, bicycle or e-scooter, car-sharing or private car: the options are steadily increasing and can contribute significantly to more sustainable, cheaper and healthier mobility. The choice of the appropriate means of transport always depends on the circumstances: Which services are available, how is the weather developing, is there a lot of traffic or limited parking at the destination? Seamless mobility means being able to choose the most suitable means of transport for each leg of the journey and to switch between them quickly and conveniently.