Bertha Benz, the namesake of the ThIMo main building in Ehrenbergstraße in Ilmenau, once led the way: through her innovative spirit, the pioneer of the automobile paved the way for the development of the Benz patent motor car for series production. With her famous drive from Mannheim to Pforzheim in her husband Carl Benz’s car in August 1888, she proved that the new vehicle technology was not only an ingenious invention, but also practical - and thus laid the foundations for substantial value creation that continues to shape Germany and the world today.
"We would like to emulate this role model," explained Matthias Hein when welcoming the Minister:
ThIMo sees it as its task to lead technological innovations to practical applications that later benefit society through economic benefits.
"Mobility in rural areas is a particularly important topic," said University President Prof. Kai-Uwe Sattler:
In places where people have no rail connections and local transport is currently hardly worthwhile, technologies and applications such as those being pursued by ThIMo are highly relevant. Together with research partners such as the Bauhaus University Weimar, Thuringian companies and local authorities, we are active in research fields such as sensor technology, data analytics and artificial intelligence also beyond technologies such as highly automated driving.
These technologies form the basis for smart cities, for example, and can improve road safety, protect the climate and increase the quality of life.
Moving people and goods
Automated and connected driving is revolutionizing mobility worldwide and opening up unimagined opportunities for Thuringia to redesign traffic, cities, accessibility and mobility in a new and future-proof way. The technologies required for this are ready for widespread application, and the constellation of players, experience and requirements offers the best conditions for this, Prof. Hein is convinced:
Thuringia includes 480 towns, numerous high-tech settlements and over 100 tourist attractions that want to be networked in order to move people and goods. The integral regular-interval timetable forms the backbone for this, as it also provides the starting point for the targeted scaling of CAD applications across the region. The added value that is emerging here could make strong Thuringian industries such as electronics and sensor technology even stronger. And in addition to the new technologies, new business areas, products and services will further increase the potential for value creation.
In the Ilmenau real-world laboratory and on the ThIMo research site, Minister Colette Boos-John saw for herself just how versatile highly automated vehicles can be: In addition to the obligatory test drive with the P:Mover research vehicle, she also found out about modular vehicle platforms that can be used as autonomous shopping and delivery robots or for agricultural use. An AI-supported facial recognition system developed and patented at TU Ilmenau enables such vehicles to recognize the intentions of human road users, communicate with them appropriately and navigate safely.
"In order to transfer CAD projects to regular operation and leverage the associated value creation potential, all stakeholders should be brought together and we need suitable and coordinated funding conditions in the state and federal government, interdepartmental coordination and targeted investment," says Matthias Hein:
These could be important impulses that make Thuringia even stronger - similar to Bertha Benz’s courageous practical test.
