The 2000s: Joining Technology, Medicine, Safety, and More

Not least because of this, the way the institute communicated with the public had changed by the early 2000s. Following the attacks, Professor Spur had already admitted to »probably not having communicated enough with the public.« Work on the institute’s public relations efforts continued steadily thereafter, culminating in Professor Eckart Uhlmann’s launch of the institute’s magazine »FUTUR – Vision, Innovation, and Realization« in 1999. Its primary purpose was to inform potential R&D partners about the institute’s activities, thereby offering a more up-to-date and targeted supplement to the institute’s annual reports.

The research at the PTZ became even more accessible to outsiders through a new event format that launched in 2001: During the annual »Long Night of Science,« scientific institutions in Berlin and Potsdam open the doors to their laboratories and testing facilities and explain to anyone who walks in what their researchers are currently working on. The institutes at the Production Technology Center Berlin also participated from the very first edition. Almost at the same time, initiatives to promote young talent were launched, such as the »Girls’ Day« event, which is regularly fully booked at Fraunhofer IPK.

Such openness does not go well with a fence, which is why the gatehouse disappeared during the 2000s, and the fence was moved back so far that it now only surrounds the PTZ parking lot.

Bringing manufacturing expertise to medical engineering

One of the areas of development that Professor Eckart Uhlmann had proposed to the Fraunhofer executive board in 1997 for refocussing Fraunhofer IPK was medical engineering. The idea is quite straightforward: Certain manufacturing processes can greatly benefit medical applications – applying them in this field requires combining knowledge from production science, medicine, and medical engineering. In addition, Fraunhofer IPK already possessed expertise in numerous areas that were relevant to medicine: microtechnology and control engineering, imaging and image processing, as well as aspects of quality management. This expertise enabled applications such as implants, mechatronic surgical assistance systems and robotics, as well as developments in endoscopy, CT and MRI.

On the initiative of Professor Uhlmann and the director of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery as well as Clinical Navigation and Robotics at Charité, Professor Jürgen Bier, a collaboration between Fraunhofer IPK and Charité was launched in 2000. At the same time, in September 2000, the »Assistive Systems for Medicine« division was launched at Fraunhofer IPK, subsequently headed by Professor Tim Lüth. A graduate in electrical engineering with a Ph.D. in robotics manufacturing, he was working on clinical navigation and robotics at Charité at the time and was thus the ideal expert to transfer Fraunhofer IPK’s manufacturing expertise to the field of medical engineering.

The tiniest production

Have you ever thought about just how small a micrometer is? Or a nanometer? A micrometer is one-thousandth of a millimeter; a nanometer just one-millionth. To put it in perspective, the ratio of a nanometer to a meter is like the ratio of a hazelnut’s diameter to that of our planet Earth. The fact that humans can create structures this small seems unimaginable – and yet it is both possible and necessary. Microsystems technology not only creates the tiniest components but also surfaces with the most precise structures and the highest surface quality. It is a fundamental prerequisite for products with miniaturized components, such as smartphones.

Microtechnological expertise found its way into the research activities of Fraunhofer IPK during the 1990s. This began with the integration of a research group from the former Academy of Sciences of the GDR that focused on ultraprecision measurement technology. Along with this group came Fraunhofer IPK’s first ultraprecision machine. The start of R&D work on micro manufacturing technology was marked in October 1995 by the DFG Priority Programme »Micromechanical Production Technology«. This was followed by the first industrial joint research projects, in which the results of basic research were translated into microtechnological applications.

Concentrated expertise in Berlin

With its micromanufacturing activities, Fraunhofer IPK was not alone in Berlin. At the end of the 1990s, Berlin was home to approximately 400 companies and 24 research institutions engaged in the development of microsystem components, processes, materials, and products – excellent conditions for establishing the capital as a competence center for microsystems engineering.

Against this backdrop, a research consortium of renowned Berlin-based non-university research institutions formed at the end of 1999 with the goal of consolidating research activities in the field of microsystems engineering – both in terms of expertise and physical space – within a »Center for Microsystems Engineering Berlin (ZEMI)«. Participants included the Fraunhofer institutes IPK and IZM, the German Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), the Ferdinand-Braun-Institute for High-Frequency Technology, BESSY GmbH, and the Technische Universität Berlin. The Berlin Senate provided financial support for the project through ERDF resources.

ZEMI officially began operations at the Berlin-Adlershof Science Campus on January 1, 2001. Initially, six employees from Fraunhofer IPK and IWF were based in Adlershof. The focus of their work was on providing comprehensive support to industrial partners in the development of microproducts, micromanufacturing, and the testing of complex microsystems. To achieve this, the institutes established a joint pilot plant with climate-controlled manufacturing cells, where the partners’ microproduction equipment could be used collaboratively.

Making data tangible

In the iViP project led by Fraunhofer IPK, more than 50 partners had developed foundations for new software architectures for virtual product development, as well as workflows that would shape the day-to-day lives of developers and engineers. In the early 2000s, these workflows still envisioned very limited use of the Internet. However, with increasing globalization and continuous advancement of broadband technology, data exchange within distributed and networked companies became easier. And last but not least, advances in computing also provided the necessary processing power for complex graphical applications, as well as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in product development.

This made it possible to develop collaboratively across great distances, while sophisticated visualizations made the development process more tangible, intuitive, and realistic. The virtual product was now to be perceived not merely as a set of data, but as a genuine representation that could be worked on directly. The focus for researchers at Fraunhofer IPK was on human-centered research, i.e., taking into account the needs of users as well as how humans experience and process information, and on effective collaboration within teams – from initial development projects on tele-cooperation in the 1990s to collaborative VR in 2003.

Into the future with VR-CUBE, Holobench and data gloves

To demonstrate and research how humans would experience emerging technologies in product development, the VR lab began combining innovative hardware in September 2001. The highlight of the lab was the VR-CUBE, a five-sided projection display measuring two and a half meters in each direction. By using bright projectors and a PC-based visualization system, Fraunhofer IPK was breaking new technological ground at the time. Instead of purely graphical or geometric simulations, systems with haptic feedback also enabled users to immersively experience the physical properties of virtual prototypes. The Smart Hybrid Prototyping technology further combined virtual and real elements to achieve this.

Virtual clay modeling and rapid prototyping were also parts of these advances. They were designed to help companies evaluate intermediate results in the development of complex products more thoroughly. This became essential as products grew increasingly complex while development times needed to be shortened. In virtual clay modeling, all these approaches came together: The model is simulated and rendered realistically, while simultaneously providing haptic feedback that is intuitive and as lifelike as possible. The technology built upon the voxel modeler developed in the 1990s, in which 3D models were composed of discrete blocks rather than polygons. On the Holobench, which displayed the model in three dimensions for the user, these blocks could then be manipulated by hand just like real clay.

With VR-CUBE, PC clusters, the Holobench, force-feedback systems, VR headsets, data gloves, motion capture and tracking systems, and 3D surround audio, Fraunhofer IPK now had a state-of-the-art development environment at its disposal – one that was also intended for industrial use. At the same time, the Virtual Product and Production Development (ViPro) Demonstration Center was established, where Fraunhofer IPK and Fraunhofer institutes in Stuttgart, Bremen, Chemnitz, Darmstadt and Rostock aimed to pool their expertise and make it available primarily to small and medium-sized enterprises. Starting in October 2001, companies were able to test and verify new technologies here alongside their day-to-day operations. Through workshops, seminars and theme days, the ViPro institutes provided support in selecting software tools for virtual product development and in training employees.