Company anniversary of the machine-intelligent makers
Matthias Strobel (right) and Dr. Boris Kluge: “We were ahead of our time,” say the company founders. Today, they have their finger on the pulse with their solutions for driver assistance systems.
InMach Intelligente Maschinen GmbH celebrates its 20th anniversary. The automation specialists from Ulm can look back on two successful decades of company and innovation development. With comprehensive interdisciplinary know-how, InMach helps manufacturers of mobile machines to make their products ever more intelligent and thus more efficient.
“When we founded the company, we were ahead of our time,” recall InMach founders and managing directors Matthias Strobel and Dr. Boris Kluge. The company was spun off from the FAW Ulm research institute in 2003 with a focus on developing navigation software for service robotics, meaning household, cleaning and mowing robots. The market for these autonomous devices, which are now an integral part of everyday life, was not so advanced 20 years ago. But the founding team around Strobel and Dr. Kluge was able to use the expertise from the areas of navigation software and its linkage with environmental sensor technology to open up new markets.n.
Partner to agriculture
The young company quickly realized that there was a great need for its automation expertise in agricultural technology. The team built up knowledge around control systems and their manufacture, as well as the control of hydraulic systems and agricultural technology standards, such as ISOBUS. With this approach, InMach established itself as a control system manufacturer and automation partner for well-known agricultural machinery manufacturers. The best proof of this is the strategic investment of Horsch Maschinen GmbH in InMach in 2013.To this day, agricultural technology is the most important industry for the Ulm-based company. This is also reflected in its involvement in the most important project committees of the VDMA Agricultural Machinery Association and the AEF (Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation).
Cooperation and collaboration beyond one’s own nose has always played a decisive role at InMach. The cooperative exchange with customers and partner companies has been the focus of action from the very beginning. InMach works with brand partners who complement its own portfolio in line with requirements. These include Bosch and Bosch Rexroth as drive specialists. Ouster, Topcon and Sick can supply the necessary environment sensor technology for assistance systems. Combining our own software and control electronics with powerful components from these brand partners is the key to implementing innovative and economical automation systems.
The ISY SPU controller offers four main CPU cores and one embedded core, two Gigabit Ethernet ports with passive PoE and three CANFD interfaces.
Holistic development competence
When working with machine manufacturers, the lean InMach team fits agilely into development projects based on partnership: decision-making paths are short, flexibility in implementation is high. The interdisciplinary team offers machine manufacturers competent consulting and implementation in all areas that are important for automation: from IT and software, to electronics, to engineering and the integration of the control system into the machine architecture. Matthias Strobel explains: “Our workforce has grown organically with the market requirements. We founders are software experts, and with our entry into agricultural technology, we were joined by electronics and hydraulics specialists. The ever-increasing penetration of artificial intelligence and the growing requirements in terms of functional safety demanded the expansion of our team to include mathematicians, cyber security and algorithm experts. As a result, machine manufacturers benefit from a holistic view of the application and profound expertise from every field relevant to mobile machine automation.”
This approach to excellence is continued in the hardware: InMach’s controllers are subject to 100% in-house inspection and final testing – regardless of the required quantities. High quality levels combined with cost-effectiveness and high availability are the maxims that customers of the Ulm-based automation specialists can be sure of.
Quality and innovation are also at the heart of the Ulm-based company’s control development. Innovation scouting and the transfer of trends into technology and series production are the company’s strengths. The product range therefore includes powerful controllers such as the ISY SPU, which is designed with a 4-core processor and embedded core as well as two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces for processing large data streams, such as video signals. With this controller, camera-based assistance systems can be implemented in a functionally reliable manner.Dr. Boris Kluge sees InMach ready for the next step: “Our company is perfectly positioned for current and future market requirements. We have the products, competencies and the team to support mobile machinery manufacturers efficiently and in an innovation-leading manner in meeting the challenges of highly automated and autonomous processes. Our solutions are already providing answers to the questions of the future.”
Mobile robotics offers great potential to meet the challenges of efficiency and skills shortages in the agricultural and construction industries. InMach is working on corresponding solutions.
A look into the future
The Ulm-based company will present a first glimpse of the future at Agritechnica. Ralf Schrempp, Sales Manager at InMach, looks ahead: “Agritechnica, as our leading trade fair, offers us the right stage for our innovations with its focus on agricultural electronics in Hall 15. Our controllers are the basis of highly automated solutions that lead to greater productivity in agriculture, and thus contribute to the trade fair motto ‘Green Productivity’. We will be presenting our concepts for functionally safe systems and cyber security for agricultural machinery as part of the specialist forums.
At the trade show, the joint project Driver Cab 4.0 will demonstrate how assistance systems will help to use the available work capacity even more efficiently in the future. If the machine operator is currently under little strain during an automated work process, the innovative human-machine interface of the driver’s cab concept recognizes this state – and offers additional tasks to optimize productivity in usually inefficient phases of the work process. InMach is collaborating on this project with the Institutes of Mobile Machinery and Industrial Engineering and Organization at KIT in Karlsruhe, the Institute of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Hohenheim, the machine manufacturer CLAAS, and Budde Industriedesign.
This project vividly illustrates the areas in which InMach sees the biggest trends in the field of mobile machinery, as Matthias Strobel elaborates: “In our opinion, the shortage of skilled workers and maximizing efficiency are the most pressing challenges facing the agricultural and construction industries in particular. We therefore see the greatest market potential in highly automated to autonomous driver assistance systems and in mobile robotics. Fewer and fewer workers have to cultivate more and more land – productively and safely. This requires more intelligence in the processes and on the machines. True to our motto ‘powered by intelligence’, our software and control systems will make a decisive contribution to this.”
Award-winning developments
Over the past twenty years, numerous machine manufacturers have won industry awards, such as the DLG Medals awarded at Agritechnica, based on InMach technologies. The most recent example: the CR700 cleaning robot from Adlatus Robotics GmbH received the Purus Innovation Award for the second time in a row. Currently, it has been nominated for the third time in June 2023. Basic software and control electronics of the awarded fully autonomous machine come from InMach. The Purus Award is presented at the CMS cleaning industry trade fair in Berlin.