The Volkswagen Foundation - Germany's largest private, non-profit science funding organization - visited BIBA on September 24, 2025, as part of its two-day company outing to Bremen. After a welcome by the institute's director, Professor Michael Freitag, the participants were introduced to two research projects at BIBA in two specialist presentations.

The “MycelCycle” project is researching a sustainable alternative to existing packaging solutions. In their presentation, Birte Pupkes and Irfan Ullah explained how biological waste materials, which are colonized by fungal mycelium, can be used to create a material that will replace Styrofoam in the future and can be produced in a circular material cycle. In this interdisciplinary project, which is being conducted in collaboration with Georg August University of Göttingen and the University of Bremen, BIBA is focusing on the upscaling and automation of production processes and life cycle analyses. The “MycelCreation” co-project ties in thematically with MycelCycle and serves the purpose of science communication. The aim here is to build a participatory community for experimenting with mycelium composites in order to make circularity tangible in everyday life. Workshops and instructions will enable people to grow their own packaging at home. These two projects are currently funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Lennart Steinbacher gave a presentation on how artificial intelligence can be applied in production and logistics and what role reinforcement learning plays in this context. Using the example of line and matrix production in the automotive industry, he clearly explained how reinforcement learning can be used to control the driving routes of driverless transport vehicles. Parallel to these technical presentations, the 90 participants were able to experience a small selection of the diverse topics currently being researched intensively at BIBA in a very practical way in the BIBA shop floor lab. Current demonstrators for energy-flexible production, exoskeletons in logistics, collaborative robots in assembly, and a mobile ad hoc infrastructure unit for disaster control were presented. Thanks to the wide variety of topics covered at BIBA, there was something for every participant.