Corporate Technology - Rolf Hellinger

CT India
India, Asia’s second largest market and a center of expertise in
information technology (IT), can look back on half a century of
success as a Siemens location. In Bangalore, the Silicon Valley
of the subcontinent, CT India employs more than 80 researchers
and engineers who handle complex issues related to integrated
hardware platforms, intelligent cameras for security and
automotive applications, medical systems and software
optimization, embedded systems, renewable energy solutions,
and “S.M.A.R.T.” innovations for all three Siemens sectors.
High-Tech Innovations
for Developing Nations
Siemens can look back on a history of more
than 50 years in India. Today, the company
has over 18,000 employees at 35 locations in
the country, including 5,000 researchers, developers,
and software engineers. The company
operates 18 production facilities in the
fields of power transmission, automation, medical,
and building technologies. With the expansion
of Indian industry, demand for products
and solutions that can meet the needs of the local
market is growing rapidly.
Considering these figures, there was good
reason for Corporate Technology to open a research
center for local Siemens customers, as
well as those in other countries, in Bangalore in
April 2004. Since then, the CT team has undergone
rapid development under the direction of
Dr. Mukul Saxena, a top Indian researcher who
began with just a handful of employees. Today,
CT India and its 80 researchers and developers
handle complex issues related to integrated
hardware platforms, intelligent cameras for security
and automotive applications, medical
systems, and software optimization.
S.M.A.R.T. innovations are at the very top of
the agenda for CT India. The acronym stands for
Simple – Maintenance friendly – Affordable –
Reliable – Timely to market. That means developing
high-tech, low-cost innovations that are
reliable and, whenever possible, maintenancefree.
The sophisticated solutions developed by
CT India are tailored to the specific needs of local
customers. In short, the challenge is: “how
can I develop a high-tech product for only one
tenth of what it would cost in the U.S.?”
26 Corporate Technology
This is among the questions being addressed
for the healthcare sector, for instance, by researchers
working on very flexible client-server
architectures that distribute large volumes of
3D image data throughout a network of lowerperformance
computers — and which can also
process this data within the network in real
time. In this connection, CT scientists in India
are working closely with Siemens Corporate
Research (see p. 22) in Princeton, New Jersey,
which has assigned specialists to Bangalore for
the project.
Flexible client-server architectures would
enable surgeons in operating rooms to access
computer tomography images in real time —
without any need for high-performance computers.
The computing resources provided by
many background computers would be used in
a way that would make it possible to call up images
via a workstation with the help of special
visualization software.
Cameras with Brains
One of the many examples of S.M.A.R.T. innovation
from CT India is an inexpensive camera
equipped with a digital signal processor. The
camera offers several benefits. Its components
are up to 80 percent less expensive than those
of other cameras, its technology provides an
enhanced level of functionality, and it is perfectly
suited to applications in India.
Siemens has become a preferred supplier in
the field of computer-aided image processing
(machine vision) for Indian customers, largely
because of the know-how of CT India experts in
this field. For example, Siemens has provided
the Indian Tobacco Company’s Bangalore factory
with 20 S.M.A.R.T. cameras, infrared
lamps, and sensors. The resulting system projects
infrared light on cigarette paper in order to
check its thickness — a step that allows factory
employees to quickly determine whether a machine
contains the right paper for one of six different
types of cigarettes the company makes. A
variation of this machine vision approach was
also developed for a principal supplier of the
Tata Nano car in order to automatically check
the washers for cylinder head seals. This in turn
has led to additional orders for other production
sites. CT India has thus developed low-cost automation
solutions for the Indian market that
may be applicable to the world market.
Another increasingly important area is the
development of embedded software for driver
assistance systems, including lane assistants,
which are early warning systems that prevent
car and truck drivers from inadvertently leaving
the lane they’re traveling in. Various types of
optical systems are used here to determine a vehicle’s
actual position within a lane. Systems
like these would normally require a high level of
computing power packed into a small area —
but CT’s experts in Bangalore are now looking to
develop a small and reliable system that can reduce
the time needed for lane tracking computations
by 80 percent without any loss of precision.
Corporate Technology is also handling the
associated software-hardware adaptations, and
vice versa. Its solution spectrum therefore encompasses
the entire embedded system.