SAPHARI

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is the leading organisation for institutes of applied research in Germany, undertaking contract research on behalf of industry, the service sector and the government. Commissioned by customers in industry, it provides rapid, economical and readily applicable solutions to technical and organisational problems. Within the framework of the European Union's technology programs, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is actively involved in industrial consortia seeking technical solutions to improve the competitiveness of European industry. At present, the organisation maintains over 59 research institutes with some 17,000 employees at locations throughout Germany.

The Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB) has 350 permanent employees (including 300 scientists) and has annual operational costs of about 20 million € (2009). IOSB develops innovative concepts and application solutions in information technology. It provides sustainable solutions of advanced control systems technology, vision and image processing systems, multi-sensor technology mainly for industrial partners including SMEs.

The Department Systems for Measurement, Control and Diagnosis (MRD) has many years of experience in the design, implementation, integration and optimisation of complex systems for measuring, control and diagnosis using state-of-the-art model and knowledge based methods. Advanced multi-sensory monitoring and control systems using the latest information processing technologies have been successfully implemented in different applications in industry, robotics and resource management. Examples are the control of glass production plants, advanced diagnosis algorithms for process engineering, and mobile robots for pipe inspection (http://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/MRD).

Key researchers

Christian W. FREY was born in Freudenstadt, Germany, in 1968. He received his master degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in electrical engineering from University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1996. Since 1997 he is with Fraunhofer IOSB where he is head of the research group “Multisensor Systems” in the department “Systems for Measurement, Control and Diagnosis”. His research interests include the application of machine learning methods, fuzzy and logic to advanced online-diagnosis, monitoring and sensor fusion concepts for mechatronics, robotics and industrial plant applications (http://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/servlet/is/4648,  http://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/servlet/is/4675). He published over 50 technical papers and contributions for books.