FRAUNHOFER INSTITUTE FOR OPEN COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

The Corona pandemic saw a shift of teaching and learning into the digital space. For learners and teachers, this presented several organizational, technical, and didactic challenges. In particular, the numerous stand-alone solutions offered by various educational institutions made it difficult for users to take full advantage of digital learning. 

To warn drivers of a collision with a cyclist, an e-scooter rider of road damage, or to guide a blind person to the right government office or the bus door, highly accurate localization is always of fundamental importance. Fraunhofer FOKUS will be presenting its “Location-as-a-Service” at the ITS World Congress in Hamburg from October 11 to 15, 2021, at the “Reallabor Hamburg” project booth in Hall B2.

A consortium of 12 partners will develop and test technologies for automated driving on the railroads in the project “Berliner Digitaler Bahnbetrieb” (BerDiBa) over the next 4 years. Fraunhofer FOKUS will use its expertise in environment perception for the automated vehicle and adapt its artificial intelligence tools for traffic on rails.

Counterfeit-proof product protection and resilient supply chains are the goals of the Fraunhofer SmartID project. The Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Polymer Research IAP, for Secure Information Technology SIT and for Open Communication Systems FOKUS are developing a novel marking system that can determine the authenticity of products via smart devices even while being offline, i.e. without access to a database. SmartID will be embedded in existing track & trace infrastructures and can be printed on products or their packaging using commercially available printing processes.

Beginning in August, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the establishment of four hubs for research into the future technology 6G with up to 250 million euros. Fraunhofer FOKUS will be involved in two of them over the next four years: the “6G Research and Innovation Cluster” (6G-RIC) and the Open6GHub. Drawing on its many years of 4G and 5G core network expertise, the team from the Software-based Networks business unit will design essential components for an organic, distributed 6G core network and integrate them into the emerging test environments.

Smart cities – cities that become more efficient, technologically advanced and greener with the help of information and communication technologies (ICT) – have emerged as a way to solve the most pressing urban challenges and thus enable sustainable urban development. With the study “An overview of urban data platforms – An evaluation according to design principles of DIN SPEC 91357”, scientists from Fraunhofer FOKUS now present an overview of urban data platforms for smart cities.