Dr. Wan Ding

Please tell us what fascinates you most about research.
What captivates me most about research is its profound potential to enhance and enrich the life of people. Whether it be pioneering breakthroughs or leveraging the insights of predecessors, research is fundamentally driven by the noble aim to find ways to continuously bring value to others and improve our lives. Moreover, research lets me understand the value of both patience and foresight. Research is about innovation and creativity, problem-solving, uncovering new possibilities, and making progress that benefits everyone. And that’s what truly excites me about delving into the world of research.

What makes research done at Bosch so special?
I really appreciate the openness and encouragement in Bosch for researchers to explore new technologies that are ultimately invented for life. Bosch focuses on research that directly translates into practical applications and solutions for real-world challenges and is deeply rooted in understanding and addressing customer needs. The research efforts are often driven by the aim to improve the quality of life, enhance safety, and promote sustainability. Bosch encourages interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together experts from various fields such as engineering, computer science, materials science, and more. This holistic approach fosters innovation by leveraging diverse perspectives and knowledge. By prioritizing customer-centric innovation, Bosch ensures that its research efforts result in products and services that meet the evolving demands of consumers and industries. With a global presence and a network of research and development centers around the world, Bosch has access to diverse talent resources that enables the company to leverage local expertise and insights while tackling global challenges.

What research topics are you currently working on at Bosch?
Based on the BCI products, including NEXEED (Automation and Industrial Automation System (IAS)) and Bosch Semantic Stack, my team and I are currently working on creating a modular and lightweight software solution that facilitates seamless interactions among Large Language Modules (LLMs), Digital Twins (Aspect Models and Knowledge Graphs), and NEXEED IAS modules.

What are the biggest scientific challenges in your field of research?
In the domain of smart manufacturing, we are dealing with scientific challenges in many aspects. For the robots, we face the challenges of how the objects with different material types, colors, and geometric shapes can be identified, positioned, picked, and placed nicely in the required posture by the industrial robots, how the mobile robots can understand the working environment and reason the task logic and path to execute a command in an explainable way. For flexible automated modular production, we need modular software architecture for low-effort reconfiguration and reusable modularity, virtual software commissioning for fast process and cycle time validation, optimization algorithms for best station layout, dynamic process orchestration for variable process flow and dispatching of robot and human, etc. For digitalization, we tackle the challenge of how to make the LLMs speak accurate Bosch language in the manufacturing domain and how to explore a new way of efficiently utilizing and interacting with our industrial automation system modules and digital twin systems with the integration of foundation models.

How do the results of your research become part of solutions “Invented for life”?
We are developing a vision-guided robotic bin-picking system that improves efficiency and releases human operators of repeatable work. The flexible manufacturing system that shortens the time to market and solves fast iterations reduces the overall production cost, which will benefit the end customers. The digital twin system that enables full transparency of product lifecycle data will shorten the overall decision-making process and response time for solution users. We will continue to guide our research to fulfill the slogan of “Invented for life”.