Research Infrastructures
Under the professional guidance of the National Research Infrastructure Committee (NKIB), established by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NRDI Office), and with the involvement of independent external experts, the qualified research infrastructures were identified again in 2024. Together with the qualifications granted in 2021, a total of 111 qualified research infrastructures are currently operating in Hungary, 6 of which are located at HUN-REN SZTAKI.
Digital Holographic Microscope Devices
Digital Holographic Microscopy offers two key advantages. First, when analyzing rare samples (e.g., drinking water), it can scan volumes up to 1,000 times larger in a single snapshot than conventional microscopes. Second, since the sample only needs to pass through a transparent flow cell in front of the microscope, no sample preparation is required.
As a result, this technology enables a wide range of applications, such as the continuous and automated monitoring of drinking water, food, industrial liquids, and natural waters.
HUN-REN SZTAKI currently operates three digital holographic microscopes with different resolutions and spectral characteristics.
Activities and Services
- The microscopes can be used in both environmental and industrial fields.
- In environmental applications, the monitoring of our natural waters and the infiltrating wastewater can be automated with this technology. In the industrial field, automated microscopic analysis can support the food, cosmetics, chemical, manufacturing, and biotechnology industries.
Availability
- The microscopes are accessible to everyone following prior arrangement via email.
- The first measurement series are free of charge, and if a collaborative research project is established, subsequent measurements remain free.
- Longer-term measurement series are subject to a fee, which will be determined at a later stage.
- Additionally, it is possible to deploy the microscopes on a pilot basis at research or industrial sites, allowing the equipment to be tested directly in the user environment.
Contact
Human-centered Technologies in Mechatronics and Robotics
After the sweeping changes in mechatronics and robotics brought about by information technology, the world's attention has turned to the people working with these systems. The network of three independent research infrastructures provides resources and experimental solutions that could support human creativity, reduce physical and mental stress.
The University of Debrecen is targeting human-centered custom virtual modeling techniques, mainly in the field of vehicle mechatronics and social robotics. The focus of the BME Mechatronics Measurements Laboratory is on the measurement and modeling of haptic systems, various motion analysis, and optical systems. HUN-REN SZTAKI focuses on autonomous robotic systems and human-robot interaction, their digital twin models and energy efficiency.
Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory
In all phases of research and development, the laboratory supports the modeling of autonomous vehicles, the testing and validation of developed software (control and navigation algorithms) and hardware (sensors, sensor and communication networks, on-board control systems).
The new algorithms and hardware elements are first tested in a simulation environment, on realistic digital twin models of the vehicles.This is followed by the real-time implementation of the procedures, the testing of sensor and communication systems in the indoor test arena, using small electric vehicles. The built-in sensor and computer systems even enable experiments with a large number of cooperating vehicles, under controlled and controllable laboratory conditions. The final phase is the validation of the system under real conditions, on high-performance outdoor drones and real road vehicles, provided by the infrastructure's outdoor test platform.
HUN-REN Cloud
HUN-REN Cloud, the cloud-based computing system operated by the Hungarian Research Network (HUN-REN) is one of the largest general-purpose research infrastructures in Hungary. Members of the scientific community in Hungary not only use but develop and operate the cloud services as well. Supported by HUN-REN, the Institute for Computer Science and Control (SZTAKI) and the Data Centre of the Wigner Research Centre for Physics provide computing and data services to HUN-REN Cloud users involved in more than 150 research projects.
The success of new scientific research is increasingly dependent on the efficient storage and processing of ample amounts of data originating from research. The HUN-REN Cloud facilitates research work by providing a turnkey high-capacity hardware infrastructure and special software environment necessary for data-driven research. Custom-tailored professional support is also available on demand.
HUN-REN Cloud provides access to an innovative IT platform to research teams that cannot afford the costs and efforts associated with the procurement, installation and operation of their own systems. Leveraging the applied scalability and virtualization technologies, the cloud can serve various and constantly changing user demands, resulting in significant economic savings.
Activities and Services
Research often requires complex, large-scale platforms based on the coordinated operation of multiple components. HUN-REN Cloud therefore provides customisable, reliable and scalable templates, among others with the help of so-called cloud orchestration methods. In addition to operating systems and basic IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) level cloud functionalities, the most popular artificial intelligence research and data ingestion frameworks are also available at PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) level, thanks to the open architecture based on OpenStack.
Based on positive feedback received in recent years, as well as the growing demand for artificial intelligence applications, the cloud capacity was significantly expanded in 2021. As a result, 5900 vCPU, 2060 vGPU, 28 TB RAM, 338 TB SSD storage, 1.25 PB HDD storage and 100 Gbps network capacities have become available to users. The enhanced HUN-REN Cloud provides a competitive research infrastructure on a European level that also welcomes projects initiated by universities and national laboratories.
Industry 4.0 Research and Demonstration Infrastructure Network
The infrastructure network consists of three research centres, two of which are operated by HUN-REN SZTAKI and one by BME. Locally, two are in Budapest and one in Győr. The focus and competence of the three centres complement each other synergistically. The HUN-REN SZTAKI’s Industry 4.0 Centre of Excellence in Győr targets problems where the high-level basic research helps solving practical industry needs. Cyber-physical systems are computing structures that are intensively connected to the surrounding physical world and physical processes, and at the same time serve and utilize the data access and data processing services available on the Internet. The centre focuses primarily on robotic tasks.
The IoT capabilities of the pilot system are also developing to support the tracking and tracing of the objects of the production system (e.g., using advanced 5G technologies). The mission of the BME Industry 4.0 Technology Centre is to have as many modern and efficient companies using a wide range of Industry 4.0 technologies. To achieve this, it provides demonstration, education primarily to SME-s. The Centre operates more than twenty advanced solutions, on which the industrial application possibilities of several technology can be learned. The SmartFactory is a compact, high-level but functional research and demonstration facility of HUN-REN SZTAKI which compresses a production site to the size of a single room and presents key physical and virtual processes of industrial manufacturing in a tangible, explorable way. Hence, a fleet of small autonomous mobile robots will be added to the system, as well as the new version of the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) of HUN-REN SZTAKI which fully supports the orchestration of autonomous units. In parallel, all the developments are updated in the Digital Twin of the system.
3D Perception and Modeling Measurement System
The network aims to research and develop new static and dynamic environmental sensing methods and tools for multi-sensor measurement environments and to demonstrate and apply these in applications addressing air and ground autonomous driving, traffic monitoring, remote sensing, smart city critical infrastructure monitoring, cultural heritage protection, ecology, earth observation, 3D urban reconstruction and medical fields.
The RI’s measurement laboratory contains several different laser scanners, which enable one to scan both the static and the dynamic environment, and to detect, recognize and reconstruct various objects and events. The representation, interpretation, and visualization of the obtained 3D/4D models are cutting edge research tasks today, which can be targeted by the laboratory. Also, the RI is equipped with micro air vehicles and a motion capture system that enables the tracking of retroreflective markers with high precision and data rate. Therefore, the SZTAKI MIMO (MIcro aerial vehicle and MOtion capture) arena is an ideal tool to record ground truth data to evaluate the performance of different on-board computer vision algorithms for ground and aerial mobile robots, e.g., visual odometry, 3D mapping, simultaneous localization and mapping, and tracking of objects.
The goal of the RI is the interpretation and organization of information coming from distributed multimodal sensors. Sensors can be dynamic or static imaging devices or other multimedia sources. The main challenge is to compare, evaluate, recognize, and classify spatial and temporal sequences of events by the means of machine learning, data mining, machine perception, optimization procedures and variation analysis.
Activities and Services
- 3D LiDAR and aerial survey and reconstruction, algorithmic point cloud and image processing
- design of spatial artificial intelligence algorithms, software development, automatic interpretation of spatial data, sensor fusion, consulting
- modeling, motion tracking and data analysis within the MIMO arena, hardware-software testing and evaluation
- medical image segmentation, 3D organ reconstruction
- automatic analysis of architectural and archaeological structures
- earth observation tools to support transport and agriculture applications
- environmental perception of autonomous driving