Infra-structure
Sharing software, research data, and physical and virtual laboratories: The RIG is pooling existing technical resources to achieve this goal, creating a collaborative research and innovation community.
In this open ecosystem, all partners will have access to shared software and data. Research results will be transferable, and duplication or unnecessary work will be avoided. Since outstanding infrastructures and research platforms already exist in Germany, the RIG ensures that these are made available to its partners.
Examples of infrastructures include the ‘KI.FABRIK’ or “AI.FACTORY” of the future at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), underwater robotics laboratories at the German Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and the PACE Lab at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML). Examples of research platforms include the ARMAR robots at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the humanoid robots Justin and Toro from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), and the RBO Hand 3 from the Technical University of Berlin, an artificial hand.
The RIG uses several factors to assess the sustainability of this concept. These include evaluating the quality of the open research data, how much data is actually made available, whether it can be automatically processed semantically, how many RIG labs are shared, how much they are used, and how much shared software is utilized. Ultimately, the aim is to better tackle large-scale research projects based on this shared infrastructure.