Prof. Dr.-Ing. Steven Peters
Dear Readers, we are glad to present our latest annual report, which from this year on will be published regularly at the end of the summer semester.
It was a successful year with a lot of PhD exams and new exciting projects. FZD 3.0 has arrived and is looking forward to the future.
Already in the fall of 2022, we were able to celebrate an important milestone with the funding decision for the BMBF project AUTOtech.agil. FZD will focus on energy-efficient AI in perception, automated low-speed functions and new safeguarding methods in this three-year project, which will be led by ika at RWTH Aachen University and will receive a total of around €25 million in funding. In May, the predecessor project UNICARagil (also funded by BMBF) was completed with an impressive demonstration in Aldenhoven with many prominent guests from politics and industry.
Since January, we are proud owner of a Mercedes-Benz EQS with Drive Pilot, the first certified Level 3 AD system in Germany. Insightful studies about it offer us the opportunity for publications with a wide reach and impact. With new contract research projects in the commercial vehicle sector, we are very well represented in the most promising use case for automated driving. With the continuation of research into assistance systems for trams, we are continuing a success story of several years with HEAG mobilo in Darmstadt. Together with colleagues from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, we are now also increasingly competing for European funding with our project ideas.
In education, our new lecture “Fundamentals of Digitalization” aims to enable our students to take on a bridging function between mechanical engineering and data or software-driven innovations. In the summer semester, we offered our lecture “Trends in Automotive Engineering” for the first time together with TU Graz as a “Europe Lecture” in the Unite! network. We will start the completely redesigned lecture “Ride & Handling” in this winter semester and from 2024 on, the new lecture “Driver Assistance Systems and Automated Driving”.
Special thanks go once again to Hermann Winner for the supervision of many Phd theses. Now, I am looking forward to my very first “Doktorkind” and remain with best regards from Darmstadt.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Steven Peters in September 2023
