• KION Group establishes a research hub for AI-assisted intralogistics solutions
• Sebastian Peitz was appointed professor at the Department of Computer Science at TU Dortmund University
• Ching Pong Quek, CTO of KION Group: “Planned collaboration underlines our pioneering role in the promising technological field of Artificial Intelligence (AI)”

The KION Group is funding an Endowed Professorship for Safe Autonomous Systems at TU Dortmund University. Sebastian Peitz will be responsible for this field. He has been appointed professor at the Department of Computer Science and will begin his research and teaching activities at the university in the winter semester 2024/2025.

His work will focus on developing autonomous systems that operate intelligently and safely for all parties involved. This applies, in particular, to autonomous mobile robots, forklift trucks, and AI-based systems used in logistics and production environments. The objective of the endowed professorship is to advance the field of research at the highest international level. The professorship will form a hub for digital and intelligent logistics in close collaboration with research networks and cooperation partners within and outside TU Dortmund University, such as the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML and the KION Group.

“The planned collaboration with TU Dortmund University and Professor Peitz will lead to relevant milestones in the field of artificial intelligence,” says Ching Pong Quek, Chief Technology Officer of the KION Group. He adds that the endowed professorship will complement the KION Group’s internal research and development activities in the fields of AI and machine learning and underline its pioneering role in one of the most promising technological fields for the future. “The KION endowed professorship will help autonomous industrial trucks and other machines in the storage and logistics industry to work more safely and efficiently,” emphasizes Quek.

After completing his PhD in 2017, Sebastian Peitz worked at the University of Paderborn as a postdoc at the Institute for Industrial Mathematics before moving to the Institute for Computer Science as a junior professor in 2021. He has extensive experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Since 2022, he has led an AI junior research group to develop multi-criteria training algorithms for deep learning. At the beginning of September, the European Research Council granted him a Starting Grant for secure and data-efficient reinforcement learning for complex technical systems.

TU Dortmund University offers a unique environment that enables a combination of fundamental and application-oriented research and also combines logistics and computer science. The Department of Computer Science is one of the leading faculties in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The KION Group will finance the endowed professorship with one million euros over five years.