Fraunhofer Institute for Transportation and Infrastructure Systems IVI

The new Machine Automation Lab of the Fraunhofer IVI was launched last Thursday with the signing of a cooperation agreement and the ceremonial unveiling of the logo. This working group is a joint project of the institute and its long-standing research partner Sensor-Technk Wiedemann GmbH (STW) with the objective of bundling infrastructure and know-how to develop new technologies and products for autonomous working machines and commercial vehicles. 

With the strategic cooperation of this working group, the Fraunhofer IVI is granted early access to R&D topics that are relevant to the market. Furthermore, the institute is introduced to potential clients for new technology developments. In return, STW will benefit from the scientific expertise and infrastructure of the Fraunhofer IVI for their pre-development of highly automated products.

• Press release by STW

June 21, 2019

The signing of a cooperation agreement in the presence of the Saxon State Minister of the Interior, Prof. Dr. Roland Wöller, has further consolidated the long-term collaboration between the Police Office of Administration, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and the Fraunhofer IVI. The subject matter of the agreement is the development, implementation and improvement of a police messenger system for the regular police service in the Free State of Saxony.

This innovation is built on the »SE-Netz«, a system for communication and operational command for special police forces, based on the latest IC technologies and developed at the Fraunhofer IVI under the management of Dr. Danowski. The system has been used in Saxony since 2014 and it has by now also become established as the nationwide standard for special forces.

The project will be completed by the end of 2024. The Fraunhofer IVI will receive about 3 million Euros of funding to support the mobile police work with groundbreaking technologies.

Prof. Dr. Reimund Neugebauer, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and one of the signatories of the agreement, emphasized in particular the continuity of this highly successful partnership: »From this exemplarily close and trustful cooperation between the State Office of Criminal Investigations, the Fraunhofer IVI and the police forces, systems for communication and operational command for the effective collaboration across borders and authorities have emerged, supporting security authorities on federal and state level in the digital world. I am pleased that these systems have now become established as the federal standard and that we can sign an agreement for a new long-term cooperation with the Saxon Police Force today«.

• Press release of the Saxon State Ministry of the Interior (in German)

On June 17, 2019, the Saxon State Minister for the Environment and Agriculture, Thomas Schmidt, officially launched the »SIH test and demonstration field«. Located in an area with an extent of approximately 2000 square meters between the towns of Köllitsch, Lommatzsch and Nossen, groundbreaking developments in agriculture and forestry – based on novel 5G technologies – will be tested and demonstrated there.

The public event took place at the teaching and research farm in Köllitsch and offered a variety of presentations, showcases and workshops in the fields of communication infrastructure in rural areas, digital plant cultivation, robotics in livestock farming, digital fruit growing and viniculture as well as digital villages.

The scientific partners of the project are the Saxon State Office for the Environment, Agriculture and Geology and two institutes of the TU Dresden – the Institute of Natural Materials Technology, Chair of Agricultural Systems and Technology, as well as the Vodafone Chair for Mobile Communications Systems – and the 5G Lab Germany. Several agricultural enterprises in the region complete the project team.

Fraunhofer contributes a number of competencies and experience from past and present research projects, such as »Digitale Dörfer« (digital villages). The recently launched lighthouse project »Cognitive Agriculture« (»COGNAC«), coordinated by the Fraunhofer IESE, addresses several of these topics. In addition to sensors for soil analysis and automation, an Agricultural Dataspace (ADS) is being developed together with the Fraunhofer institutes IVI and IKTS, enabling the interoperable use of data while meeting high security requirements. The »SIH test and demonstration field« offers ideal conditions to carry out extensive trials of the platform.

• Press release of the Saxon Sate Ministry for the Environment and Agriculture (in German) 

Under the motto »Wissenschaft statt Kissenschlacht« (Stop pillow fights and do science instead!), numerous presentations, experiments and tours attracted an interested crowd to visit the Dresden Science Night, which took place for the 17^th time on June 14. Along with Dresden’s universities and science-related companies, the Fraunhofer IVI and Fraunhofer IIS/EAS participated in the evening event.

The versatile program included a demonstration of the electric bus ColumBus, taking the visitors for a test ride. Many were also impressed by an electric truck that drives completely autonomously in gated areas such as harbors or factory sites, and features real-time maneuver planning and high-precision driving. A special highlight of the evening took place on the test track, where two BMWi3 demonstrated how connected cars exchange all kinds of information during cooperative driving, for instance at traffic lights and critical narrows. The visitors also took the opportunity to learn about the Fraunhofer IVI Accident Prevention School (FAPS). They used tablets to take the perspectives of different road users and thus gain more sensitivity towards the dangers of traffic. A Bobby car race and various options for painting and handicrafts made the evening perfect for the little ones.

The harbor at Lake Bergheide now accommodates its first inhabitant. The floating autartec^® house – developed within a growth core project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) – is designed to enrich the Lusatian Lake District with its unconventional look and a multitude of implemented novel technologies.

• Link to the press release
• More information

On March 22-24, the 2019 Safety Days were held at Universität Paderborn. The interdisciplinary convention had the motto »Informationstechnologie trifft zivile Gefahrenabwehr« (Information Technology Meets Emergency Response) and offered the opportunity for decision makers, practicioners as well as scholars, IT professionals and amateurs to discuss opportunities and challenges arising from the use of new technologies in the field of emergency response. 

The special highlight of the Safety Days was a 48-hour hackathon, during which users and IT professionals worked together to create relevant solutions. One of the Fraunhofer IVI researchers participated in both the convention and the hackathon. He and his team worked on integrating the alarm messages of the Paderborn fire department into their geodata service. The results of the hackathon were presented in front of an expert audience.

February 8, 2019

The additive production of components, also called 3D printing, allows higher degrees of freedom in the design of components. However, there is still no standardization that guarantees that a component will functionally survive the entire life cycle of a product. Especially in aviation, with life cycles of many decades, however, this safety must be guaranteed.

In order to solve this problem and create a highly complex certification process for this novel sample component manufacturing process, the consortium of the AMCOCS (Additive Manufactured Component Certification Services) project met on February 5, 2019 to kick off the project. At the site of the consortium leader Elbe Flugzeugwerke (EFW), a joint venture of Singapore Technologies and Airbus, the project-executing agency DLR was given an understanding of the complexity of the research project and during a plant tour, the relevance of the necessary project output was explained on the basis of the Airbus body conversion from passenger to cargo aircraft – in this segment, EFW is the world market leader.

In addition to the consortium leader, the Fraunhofer IVI, with its expertise in the areas of Big Data processing and AI analytics, is the idea generator and implementation partner within the research project. Other project participants are Software AG, IMA Materialforschung und Anwendungstechnik GmbH and the Institute for Aerospace Technology at the TU Dresden.

• More information