Astrium has become a partner of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). “Our involvement in the DKFI has launched a highly promising co-operation on scientific research and development activities in Bremen. The existing skills and knowledge of the two partners ideally complement one another when it comes to the development of new intelligent systems for future space missions,” Astrium Deutschland’s CEO Evert Dudok said in Bremen on Thursday.
Bremen, 27
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“We are very proud that Bremen has been a DFKI site since February 2006, alongside Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken. The Center’s broad range of research activities fits in very well with the research scene here. The ‘Lunares’ project funded by the Land of Bremen and by the German Aerospace Center, in which science and industry have pooled their expertise, illustrates the excellent collaborative research for which Bremen is renowned far beyond its borders,” states Dr. Heiner Heseler, councillor of state to the Senator for Economics and Ports in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen.
The objective of ‘Lunares’ is to make use of various existing robotics technologies to investigate celestial bodies, and particularly to explore lunar craters. Astrium, the DFKI and OHB-System are working together to devise an exploration scenario. A ‘robot team’ – consisting of a walking robot (DFKI), a rover (Astrium) and a manipulator (Astrium) on a landing craft (OHB-System) – is being tested in a landscape based on that of the moon’s surface. This scenario is designed to prove that the individual elements can be combined to produce an overall robotics system that will co-operate efficiently. The 2.2 million euro project is to run until 2009.
“The further exploration of space, and even more so its economic exploitation, will depend on the use of mobile robot teams that apply the methods of Artificial Intelligence and jointly handle complex tasks in space as a co-operating unit. However, robots can only perform these tasks if they are not only unusually sturdy, so that they can cope with the hostile environment, but if they also have local autonomy and a sophisticated sensor system,” said Professor Wolfgang Wahlster at the conclusion of the press conference.
Astrium, a wholly owned subsidiary of EADS, is dedicated to providing civil and defence space systems and services. In 2006, Astrium had a turnover of €3.2 billion and 11,000 employees in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Netherlands. Its three main areas of activity are: the business units Astrium Space Transportation for launchers and orbital infrastructure, and Astrium Satellites for spacecraft and ground segment, and its wholly owned subsidiary Astrium Services for the development and delivery of satellite services.
EADS is a global leader in aerospace, defence and related services. In 2006, EADS generated revenues of €39.4 billion and employed a workforce of more than 116, 000.
