Projects and products

Fraunhofer IOSB is a partner in the SM4RTENANCE project to enable a federated neutral cross-sector data space, resulting in the development of interoperable circular twins and integration between data spaces

Images are a fundamental tool for our understanding of the world both at microscopic and macroscopic length scales. The simplest way to acquire an image is to analyze light through spatially resolved intensity measurements, e.g., on a camera, but this approach is limited by diffraction. The development of imaging techniques that beat the diffraction limit is known as super-resolution.

Wir unterstützen die maritime Situationsüberwachung mithilfe von KI-gestützen Methoden bei der Datenanalyse und der digitalen Lagedarstellung. Dabei setzen wir unsere folgende Expertise ein: KI für räumlich-zeitliche Daten, Expertensysteme, Anomaliedetektion, Lagebilddarstellung sowie unser Produkt Digitaler Lagetisch (DigLT).

Our Advanced Occupant Monitoring System detects the driver and all occupants of a vehicle to distinguish between different activities and detect critical situations.

Free-space optical communications is an excellent example of a technology with both military and civilian relevance and also with compelling scientific timeliness and good market prospects. Based on experience of the IOSB’s employees in the area of laser beam propagation through turbulence, new laser-based telecommunications concepts are being designed, implemented and tested against atmospheric disturbances.

The Competence center “Robot systems for decontamination in hazardous environments” is the research center for autonomous or semi-autonomous robot systems, which are to be used in practical applications where work has so far been associated with a considerable risk potential for humans.

The aim of the project is to make the operation of drones safer - by connecting U-Space to data sources on relevant hazard information, including monitoring drone statuses, AI-based decision support and communication concepts.

As an alternative to the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, holographic wavefront sensors (HWFS) provide the potential for significantly increased bandwidth capabilities as well as insensitivity to obscurations. The HWFS consists of two main components: a holographic diffractive optical element (DOE) and a small detector array.

To facilitate faster data transfer between astronomical equipment in space and base stations on Earth, optical communications links can be deployed. Among the design challenges faced when designing deep space communications are: very low power of received signals, the effect atmospheric turbulence on propagating signals, and strong presence of background light from the Sun, which varies over the course of the day. To cope with these challenges, deep space optical communications require adaptive optics (AO) systems to maximize the number of received signal photons, as well as exceptionally narrow bandwidth optical filters to remove background noise from received signals.

Despite the availability of significantly higher bandwidth, the underwater environment poses challenges to the design of optical communications systems. In clean ocean water, extinction due to absorption and scattering very strong, and limits the useful range of underwater communications to ∼100 m in the blue-green spectral window. Additionally, underwater optical turbulence stemming from minute differences in water’s refractive index and salinity perturbs the transmitted laser beams effecting the fidelity of received signals. In the Adaptive Optics group at Fraunhofer IOSB, we study the effect of underwater optical tur-bulence on transmitted laser light and try to compensate the effects of turbulence using adaptive optics systems.