2023 Highlight Projects

VILSA-BRUNNEN Otto Rodekohr GmbH added a new high bay warehouse to its facility in Bruchhausen-Vilsen, Lower Saxony. With room for 46,500 pallets, it is one of the largest in Northern Germany and an important milestone in the beverage manufacturer’s more than 111-year history.

To utilize this warehouse’s capacities optimally in a highly volatile and somewhat seasonal market and to ensure as close to 100% delivery capability as possible, the long-standing company contracted Fraunhofer IFF to perform data analyses and process simulations for production planning and warehouse management and to study how they can be synchronized and optimized strategically and tactically.

The project ran from October to December 2023.

The identification of items’ chemical composition has numerous applications, such as food quality control, plant health assessment, counterfeit detection and recycling in the circular economy.

Together with the University of Bielefeld, Fraunhofer IFF used optical spectroscopy and AI data analysis to develop new methods to relay AI models between different pieces of sensor hardware in the TiM research project. This is significantly less expensive than creating a new AI model for every sensor.

Fraunhofer IFF developed a sensor system that recognizes people and their gestures for SIASUN Virtual Reality Industrial Technology Research Institute in China.

A cobot equipped with the system will lighten the workloads of guest guides at the institute’s visitor center. The mobile platform’s tracking system follows a guide fully autonomously. The camera-based gesture recognition enables the cobot to mimic “its” human’s gestures.

Among other things, wings are attached to the fuselages of various aircraft types in the four final assembly lines at the Airbus plant in Hamburg. The perfect mating of the extremely large parts includes numerous individual inspection and alignment processes. Highly trained employees primarily measure the numerous measuring points manually. This demands great care and their work requires substantial time.

Fraunhofer technology will be ushering in improvements here in the future. The AirBox was field tested at the plant in several individual projects. It is intended to monitor wing assembly subprocesses automatically and in real time with sensors. The digital data are collected, visualized and used to control the mating process. Sensor-assisted process monitoring is more ergonomic and saves time too.

Explosive ordnance and land mines still pose a significant danger long after a war. Merely the suspicion that land is contaminated restricts its use significantly, e.g., for farming or development.

Freeing such land from unexploded ordnance and dangerous munition remnants takes decades and is expensive and extremely dangerous.

The solution developed in the AutoDrone UA project overflies land with large drone swarms and analyzes it five times faster, without putting ground-controlled systems, mine detection dogs or people at risk.

Fraunhofer IFF developed the drone control software for explosive ordnance disposal specialists Tauber Geo-Consult.

More than 2500 signal boxes are needed to control rail operation in Germany. More than 1000 of them are interlockings. Interlockings specify route.

These safety-related components are painstakingly made by hand at the technology leader Thales Group. Their manufacture requires intense concentration and absolutely flawless work.

Fraunhofer IFF conducted a feasibility study to ascertain how to lighten employees’ complex quality inspection workload in the future. Prototype scanning systems were developed, which perform the required inspections on interlockings automatically. Both camera-based and precision solution have to be found for this.

The project will run around one year and end in mid-2024.