Frank Golatowski

A long-lasting happiness

Beyond his activities as a senior research associate and lecturer at the University of Rostock, Dr. Frank Golatowski is among ITEA’s most longstanding Community members: over the last two decades, four of his nine projects (SIRENA, LOMS, OPTIMUM, I²PANEMA) received ITEA Awards for their exceptional results. “ITEA has developed enormously. Over the years, a large, dynamically expanding Community has grown up.”

Laying the foundations

Having completed his studies in Rostock shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank's work now takes place at the university's Institute for Applied Microelectronics and Computer Engineering - an electrical engineering institute doing basic and applied research and development in the field of technical computer science. His focus lies on interoperability, communication and dependability in distributed embedded systems, looking to overcome resource limitations while maintaining real-time performance in areas like industrial automation, railways and medical technology. In 2002, this expertise led him to ITEA

“I was made aware of the PO Days through the internet,” Frank begins. “I registered and, in my naivety, presented three project ideas. When ITEA Programme coordinator Erik Rodenbach referred to my timeslot after five minutes, I was shocked! But I could partly bring in my ideas and was involved in two projects. That was exciting. SIRENA was my first collaborative project, with partners from Germany, France and Spain, and the results accompanied my scientific work for a long time. It was about serviceoriented embedded systems and we laid the foundations for the Internet of Things – it just wasn’t called that at the time.”

A fantastic climate

Following this success, Frank has been involved in ITEA projects roughly every two years, mostly with different partners and on various themes. LOMS (2005-2008), for instance, looked at local mobile services and used mobile robots to demonstrate new maintenance services for mobile workers, including AI capabilities. Frank holds a particular fondness for OPTIMUM (2017-2021), which aimed to improve capabilities in material handling and ultimately resulted in standardisation within VDMA.

“I realised that if you have strong leaders, if they have real interests in solutions, this has a lot of influence on the later results,” he says. “In OPTIMUM, we had very strong leadership by Demag. It was a fantastic climate in the groups; we met very often, including online. We had to consider corona during the runtime of the project, but ITEA mastered those difficult conditions brilliantly. I also learned a lot by getting involved in standardisation even though this is often seen as an industry task. At the standardisation bodies, domain experts meet with specialists from IT and the embedded world. As universities, we can make an important contribution here and new research questions can arise.”