It's pretty obvious that the technology set to drive us automatically from A to B in the not too distant future can also be put to good use "off-road" as well. For example, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, a world leader in driveline and chassis technology and active and passive safety technology, plows more than six percent of its sales revenue into research and development every year - including accident prevention. The extensive portfolio of innovative solutions that this generates improves not only automobile mobility and autonomy, but also commercial vehicles and industrial engineering applications - as ZF is clearly demonstrating with its "Innovation Crave" on show at HANNOVER MESSE 2018.

The machine represents additional fields that stand to benefit from the megatrends of networking and artificial intelligence and can draw upon existing developments - in this particular case, material handling. After all, this is also a segment where safety, driver assistance and process automation are set to play a key role in the future. A series of smart systems equips the ZF Innovation Forklift for highly automated driving functions that perform these kinds of services. It has onboard camera and radar systems for identifying people and objects, deep-learning-capable ZF Pro AI electronics and ZF eSTEER EPS 3, which all go into making the Innovation Forklift a prime example of the company's guiding principles: "SEE - THINK - ACT".