Exciting R&D cooperation project with the ISW at the University of Stuttgart from January 2023

2023-01-11

Together with the Institute for Control Engineering of Machine Tools and Manufacturing Units (ISW) at the University of Stuttgart, we are pleased to start a new R&D cooperation project from January 2023. The aim of this project is to develop the basics of coded processing for complex safety systems with floating point arithmetic. The coded processing method will be extended by support for floating-point arithmetik. This is new territory worldwide and therefore a particularly demanding research task.

There is currently no automated solution for coded processing with floating point arithmetic available on the market. However, complex safety functions in industrial applications, e.g. in robotics or image processing, would be able to handle the diagnosis of hardware errors much more efficiently when calculating with floating point numbers and coded processing would be available. The R&D project is based on the current state of the art for coded processing and the lack of support for floating-point arithmetic. In cooperation between Silistra Systems and the ISW, the limitations of the state of the art will be overcome with the aim of integrating support for floating point numbers in such a way that complex safety functions can be implemented hardware-independently.

Financial support is provided within the framework of the Central Innovation Programme for small and medium-sized enterprises (ZIM), which focuses on tapping value creation potential. Upon successful completion of the R&D project in 2025, it is planned to develop a prototype of the then extended SIListra Safety Transformer and present it to users for industrial use.

German project homepage at ISW: https://www.isw.uni-stuttgart.de/forschung/steuerungsarchitekturen/SafeFloat/

Logo BMWK and on the basis of a decision of the German Bundestag