The safety of people interacting with robots has top priority, especially when humans and robots are working side by side instead of being separated from each other by safety fencing. The Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF’s web-based design tool helps companies design their cobots. The Cobot Designer helps minimize the risk of accidents and increases employee safety. The tool is available as a free web application.

n the recently launched joint project "T-KOS" of the Research Fab Microelectronics Germany (FMD), terahertz technology is now to be developed synergistically for industry in the fields of communication and sensor technology for the first time.

House key, wallet, health insurance card, hotel key card — a smart finger ring could replace all these in the future. Produced by a 3D printing process, the ring has an integrated RFID chip, tamper-proof, sealed and invisible.

The disinfection robot BALTO — named after a sled dog who carried urgently needed vaccines to a highly inaccessible region of Alaska a hundred years ago — is capable of disinfecting door knobs and similar objects. It does this autonomously, reacting to human beings in the surrounding area at the same time. An interface with the Building Information Modeling (BIM) process makes this possible.

Data is the currency of the future. But how can companies access the immense quantities of data generated by their machinery and use it to modernize production? Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA have developed a software called StationConnector that reads out the data and makes it available to any application.

As healthy and tasty as mushrooms might be, they are good for much more than just the dinner plate.

German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier announced the winners of the Deutscher Zukunftspreis 2020 (German Future Prize 2020) in a ceremony in Berlin today.

The volatile output of electricity from wind farms and photovoltaic plants can pose a real headache for energy companies.

Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is an extension of the IEEE 802.1 standard and aims to create reliable, deterministic and convergent Ethernet networks. The Fraunhofer IPMS now completes its TSN IP Core family with a TSN Switch IP Core and will present the innovation at the TSN/A Conference from October 7-8, 2020.

The flood of documents created every day in business and in society as a whole poses an enormous challenge. Information from countless different sources must be sorted, processed and evaluated.