On the 03.03., Dr.-Ing. Dion Hornig successfully defended his PhD thesis "Optimized Safety-Layouts for Fenceless Robots". In his work, Dion Hornig develeps new methods to automatically optimize safety layouts based on available and safety certified robot and sensor technology only. He shows that through utilizing modern nonlinear optimization techniques safety supervised areas can dynamically be adjusted and significantly be reduced as compared to the current methods that use overly conservative and simple approximations in handcrafting such layouts. The thesis was conducted and supervised in collaboration with Volkswagen. The IPR congratulates Dion for this excellent work !