Through the years, the drone market has extended from remotely operated flying devices to Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) that can operate autonomously Beyond Visible Line of Sight (BVLOS), introducing capabilities such as environmental sensing and independent decision making and enabling highly reliable and secure air to ground communication. ADACORSA targets to strengthen the European drone industry and increase public and regulatory acceptance of BVLOS (beyond visual line-of-sight) drones, by demonstrating technologies for safe, reliable and secure drone operation in all situations and flight phases. More information

The goal of this project is to investigate dependability aspects and the dynamic composition of software and hardware of complex computer platforms or embedded automotive systems (EAS) across the entire system stack. More information
 

Project CORVETTE aims to develop a software infrastructure for cognitive monitoring of vehicle fleets, which enables measurement, assessment, interpretation and use of vehicle data for diverse data-driven services. More Information

As part of the FFG frontrunner project DiSEL "Digitization of Services, Equipment and Logistics" the Institute for Technical Informatics will support the project with its expertise in the following areas: Specification of the requirements and the definition of the system architecture according to the desired requirements at system level for the digitization of bulk material unloading using sensors / heavy-duty robotics and implementation of sub-modules. Integration of additional sensors (e.g. cameras) and algorithms for predictive maintenance and life cycle optimization in the new system architecture. In DiSEL, students are involved in bachelor theses, seminars / projects and master theses (with employment). More information

D4Dairy project will address the challenges of the stakeholders along the dairy value chain, in particular of the farmers and the economic partners contributing to this project. The overall goal of D4Dairy is the generation of added value for herd management as well as the improvement of animal health, animal welfare and product quality by creating a well-developed (data) network and by exploiting the opportunities offered by new (digital) technologies and analytical methods. More Information

Vehicular networks that wirelessly connect vehicles, infrastructure, and pedestrians will be the communication backbone for future transportation. Networked smart, semi-automatic and fully autonomous vehicles will rely on shared information, distributed intelligence, and joint actions to optimize traffic/logistics, reduce pollution, and increase road safety. However, great dynamics, continuously changing network topolgies, and heterogeneous devices make dependable communication hard and demand for self-organizing radio protocols at all layers of the communication stack. This project aims on researching the foundations and practical application of self-organizing radio protocols for massively dynamic networks of mobile devices. Thus, nature-inspired techniques for medium acces control are equally important as managing multi-hop communication. More Information

The ENHANCE-UWB project aims to develop a testbed allowing for the reproducible study of UWB transmissions in complex application environments. The developed testbed should also allow benchmarking of communication performance in the presence of co-located wireless devices sharing the same spectrum, and allow experimentation of non-line-of-sight conditions. More Information

The overarching objective of OPEN-INNO-Train is to form an international and inter-sectoral network of organisations collaboratively working on the joint research field of Open Innovation, University-Industry Cooperation and Research Translation. To facilitate Knowledge Development and Sharing in four contemporary areas - FinTech, Industry 4.0, CleanTech, FoodTech. For globally interconnected societies, scientific research has the potential to foster yet unrealised economic growth, competitiveness, and wellbeing. The conversion of research outputs into tangible outcomes, and, ultimately, sustainable impact is critically important and needs optimising. The process of converting research findings into economic and social benefits appears increasingly complex at a time when researchers often work in multidisciplinary teams, in a context of Open Innovation when cooperating with industry and other stakeholders. Illuminating it from the perspective of Research Translation, an approach increasingly gaining traction in the specific setting of University-Industry Collaboration, OPEN-INNO-TRAIN aims at opening the black box of knowledge conversion processes to generate and apply new insights from those four industry areas. Furthermore, OPEN-INNO-TRAIN encapsulates the development of robust Research Translation tools capable of facilitating the translation process of multidisciplinary research findings for the generation of impact. Combining scientific excellence from European and international universities, Research and Technology Organisations with hands on expertise from pioneering companies, OPEN-INNO-TRAIN will spearhead this sustainable venture using digital innovation hubs, co-tutelle, industrial PhDs, PPPs and training measures to encourage international cooperation among researchers and industry practitioners across disciplines whose final aim is to holistically foster, enhance and sustain over time the application of good research translation practices. More Information

Industry and society are experiencing the transformational impact of the autonomous systems revolution, empowered by automation capabilities offered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Cyber-physical Systems of Systems (CPSoS) define a multi-faceted and dynamic environment where autonomy is fundamental to govern the complexity of interactions between the virtual and physical worlds with minimal human intervention. However, even when the most advanced degree of autonomy is exercised, the human is a variable which cannot be left out of the CPSoS equation, particularly in safety critical scenarios like autonomous transportation. TEACHING puts forward a vision of humans at the centre of autonomous CPSoS, by embracing the concept of Humanistic Intelligence, where the cybernetic and biological entities cooperate in a mutual empowerment towards a shared goal and where human feedback becomes a crucial driver for CPSoS adaptivity. TEACHING addresses the challenge by integrating AI with fundamental concepts of security and dependability stemming from the AI-human-CPSoS interactions, and by considering their impact on the underlying computing system. TEACHING develops a human-aware CPSoS for autonomous safety-critical applications, based on a distributed, energy-efficient and dependable AI, leveraging edge computing platforms integrating specialized computing fabric for AI and in-silico support for intelligent cybersecurity. The goal is to design a computing software and system supporting the development and deployment of adaptive and dependable CPSoS applications, allowing to exploit a sustainable human feedback to drive, optimize and personalize the provisioning of the offered services. TEACHING outcomes will fundamentally impact the development of autonomous safetycritical systems, providing means to improve their safety, dependability and overall acceptability. This impact will be demonstrated by TEACHING in two pilots concerning autonomous driving and aviation. More Information

Programmable matter is an innovative material whose physical properties can change on-demand by reprogramming the small particles it is composed of. Our focus is on shape shifting material where the macroscopic shape of the material can be changed under program control. Such material would enable a wide range of exciting applications such as beaming physical objects (by scanning the shape of an object, transmitting an encoded version of the shape, and by programming a remote shape shifting material to take on this shape), fast-prototyping of models of buildings or complex chemical molecules the user can touch and modify, and so on. Our current research focuses on the design of the elementary particles of shape shifting matter, with a particular emphasis on how to deal with the problem that shape shifting requires a substantial amount of energy. Further, we are investigating programming models that allow the specification of the desired macroscopic shape and how to translate this into actions of the individual particles. More Information

Multi-core hardware and software is becoming increasingly important in embedded automotive systems (EAS). While a large amount of complex algorithms, sensors, and actuators demand for more computational power, the desired integration density and real-time requirements of modern electronic control units (ECU) often necessitate truly parallel code execution. In addition, networked smart cars will require future embedded automotive software to be flexibly composed of a varying set of functions and services in order to retain the long-term interoperability of vehicles among each other. This project aims on researching the foundations and practical application of novel operating systems concepts and processor architectures for dynamically composed embedded multi-core systems with hard real-time constraints. Programming paradigms and schedulability analysis at kernel and application level is thus equally important as hardware support for connecting and isolating tasks and cores. More Information

Based on the results of the "Smart GigaWood" project, several intermediate steps with sub-goals will be implemented within the new project, which will ultimately lead to a functioning and applicable prototype "sharing platform". Interim results: benefit model, management structure of the wagon pool, business model, verification via test traffic and tuning via "self-learning system" and first cooperative traffic. More Information

SPiDR brings together the latest advances in wireless networking, localization, benchmarking, collaborative awareness, and machine learning, towards the development of secure, resilient, and highly-performant wireless mesh networks. Within SPiDR, we will create benchmarking infrastructures supporting experimentation on wireless networks based on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology; we will design dependable and scalable networking protocols that are resilient to malicious agents; we will provide autonomous entities such as drones with RF context- and location-awareness, as well as with the ability to identify and mitigate security threats, network anomalies, and coexistence issues. More Information

The overarching goal of TRANSACT is to develop a universal distributed solution architecture for the transformation of safety-critical cyber-physical systems from local, stand-alone systems into safe and secure distributed solutions. More Information

The goal of this project is the development of new methods development, test and deployment tools supported by digital twins in order to substantially reduce engineering overheads and to simplify the production of future automation systems. More Information