IHA - Innovative Hydraulics and Automation

Bridging of theory and practice

Innovative Hydraulics and Automation (IHA) is doing interdisciplinary research in the field of Fluid power automation, by the bridging of theory and practice with cooperation with industry.

Main research fields of IHA are Autonomous off-road machines, Digital hydraulics, Heavy-duty robotics and Hybrid technology. In these four fields IHA aims to be one of the leading research units in the world of fluid power automation. The research strategy of IHA is made up of these four research areas and ambition to develop new fluid power automation technology, which minimizes the environmental impact in all aspects. To fulfill the strategy the research of IHA follows these three principles: interdisciplinary research, the bridging of theory and practice and cooperation with industry.

Innovative Hydraulics and Automation (IHA) has been nominated twice to the Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Research by the Academy of Finland. First as an individual research unit 2000 – 2005. Second time the CoE was a joint research team of researchers from the Automation Technology Laboratory at Aalto University (former Helsinki University of Technology) and from the Innovative Hydraulics and Automation at Tampere University (former Tampere University of Technology). The Generic Intelligent Machine (GIM) project, CoE of the Academy of Finland (2008 – 2013), concentrated on basic research in the field of intelligent mobile machines.