Articles – Magazine of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS

Autonomous driving
Where driverless cars still have some catching up to do

Autonomous driving is showing promising results in defined areas. However, serious challenges can arise when driverless cars are exposed to the unpredictability of everyday road traffic. Three examples illustrate these problems.

Autonomous driving

August 1, 2025

Safetronic 2025
Focus on holistic safety for road vehicles

In the run-up to the 2026 anniversary, this year's Safetronic will once again present itself with strong topics and exciting presentations. And that's not all: the international symposium for the holistic safety of road vehicles is the annual industry get-together for safety experts from the automotive and supplier industry and related sectors.

Autonomous driving

July 24, 2025

Production
Autonomous Systems on a Leash

A precisely defined operating environment is not only important for autonomous driving. The Operational Design Domain (ODD) also ensures safety for many other highly automated systems in rail transport, logistics and mobile robotics.

Safety engineering

July 17, 2025

Artificial Intelligence
An alliance that benefits customers

Fraunhofer IKS has joined the Fraunhofer Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Alliance. According to the Institute Director Mario Trapp, exchange and collaboration within the alliance make it possible to pool expertise and create synergies - to the benefit of customers.

Artificial intelligence

July 9, 2025

Portrait Lena Heidemann
"I have always tried to give myself the space to just try everything out."

Lena Heidemann has been part of the Fraunhofer IKS since November 2020. She initially joined the institute as a student assistant. Since November 2021, she has been a research engineer in the Industrial Sensing Systems department. Her curiosity, openness and willingness to simply try out new things led her to research.

Industry 4.0

Employee portraits

June 26, 2025

Quantum Computing
How secure are quantum machine learning systems?

Machine learning models are exposed to malicious external attacks that drastically falsify results and assessments - to the harm of people in safety-critical situations. Defense strategies already exist. But what happens when quantum computing comes into play? Together with partners, Fraunhofer IKS has taken a close look at the first approaches to averting danger.

Quantum computing

June 25, 2025

Interview with Edith Holland
“Safety is a key aspect for public acceptance of automated driving”

For Safetronic 2025, we were able to gain two new members of the program committee. One of them is Edith Holland, Chief Engineer Functional Safety at the vehicle engineering, test and development consultancy HORIBA MIRA. She spoke to Safe Intelligence online magazine about her motivation and the importance of safety for road vehicles now and in future.

Autonomous driving

June 12, 2025

Automatica 2025
Simplicity meets efficiency: working safely with your robot colleague

Seeing and being seen - this not only counts in the social arena, but also in the efficient and reliable cooperation between humans and robots in industrial production. Fraunhofer IKS will be demonstrating what this is all about in particular at Automatica in Munich at the end of June under the motto: “Simplicity is key”.

Industry 4.0

June 12, 2025

Industrial Automation
MBO-KISS: The future of control applications in industry

Can AI revolutionize production control? This is the question the research project MBO-KISS (Methods for Evaluating and Optimizing AI-generated Control Applications Based on the Physical Simulation of Machines and Their Desired Behavior) aims to address. The project has started at the beginning of the year, with a total duration of three years. The goal is to investigate the possible usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating and securely applying control applications in industrial production.

Industry 4.0

May 19, 2025

ISO 9001 certification
Seal of Approval for Research Quality

It is now "official": Fraunhofer IKS demonstrably sets the highest standards for the quality of its research work. This is confirmed by the certification according to ISO 9001, which the institute has recently passed successfully.

May 7, 2025

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