Advanced System Technology branch AST of Fraunhofer IOSBThe department has many years of experience in the development and deployment of underwater robots as well as in the transfer to industrial solutions. This also includes the development of control and regulation algorithms for underwater vehicles or robots for exploration as well as for inspection and manipulation tasks on underwater infrastructures.
The department is also involved in the interdisciplinary research group of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft "Smart Ocean Technologies" (SOT) at the Rostock site. The current focus is on the development of an underwater vehicle that enables diverless performance of a wide variety of underwater maintenance tasks.
In the field of offshore maintenance, a flexible sensor carrier for multivariate inspection and analysis above and below water is also being developed in the "Miso-Inspektor" project. The focus is on non-contact inspection of finds and identification of the material composition of surfaces. The R&D activities for an autonomous underwater rescue robot, which will be used in swimming pools and bathing lakes in the future, have also become known throughout Germany.
In the field of water management, the department is involved in the "Fraunhofer Innovation Platform for the Water-Energy-Food Nexus at Stellenbosch University (FIP-WEF@SU)". This is a cooperation project between Stellenbosch University and the Fraunhofer IGB, in which the Fraunhofer Institutes IST and ISE are involved.
Another development focus is on novel approaches to nitrate monitoring in the NiMo 4.0 project: Here an overarching system is being created which combines AI procedures with methods of environmental informatics and specifically the water domain. State-of-the-art machine learning methods such as CNNs and LSTMs are used to achieve improved spatial and temporal prediction of nitrate in groundwater and thus contribute to efficient and sustainable nitrate reduction.
For the heavy rainfall events that are increasingly occurring in the course of climate change, the department also has expertise in the development of flash flood warning systems, which have already been successfully tested in practical use in Thuringia as part of the STUWASYS project.