The grant for German funding went to the project “AIRPoRT – Artificial Intelligence for Robotics and Networked Production”. Besides the research departments “Smart Data & Knowledge Services” and “Intelligent Networks” of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) are involved.
The “AIRPoRT” project aims to develop, optimise and test these technologies. The cooperation partners contribute their specific topics and experience: The DFKI research department “Smart Data & Knowledge Services”, headed by Prof. Dr. Andreas Dengel is developing innovative analysis methods for sensor data using AI. The “Intelligent Networks” department, headed by Prof. Dr. Hans Dieter Schotten, is responsible for embedding modern network technologies in an intelligent connectivity platform. The process architecture and coordination procedures for robot teams will be developed by Fraunhofer IPA, a comprehensive risk governance strategy by Fraunhofer IAO. This strategy is intended to contribute to the proactive and economically viable safeguarding of corresponding production facilities in multi-organizational process structures.
The first step of the German-Japanese cooperation will be to define common scenarios and use cases in order to adapt the technologies and concepts optimally to the requirements of global production contexts. For the future, both work on a common database and the collective development of processes are conceivable.
DFKI has been cooperating for many years with the top Japanese institutes for computer science AIST, NII and NICT, which help to advance AI research. In the industrial environment, new AI technologies are explored and developed in close cooperation with companies such as Wacom and Hitachi. The "International Workshop on Intelligence Augmentation and Amplification - IAA 2019", which took place at DFKI at the beginning of the year, also demonstrated the excellent exchange between German and Japanese scientists. Around 80 scientists, including the leading heads of Japanese AI research, met in Kaiserslautern to exchange ideas on relevant topics and to discuss joint research projects.
