Project description
Smart factory robots handle complex tasks
The factory of the future will be fully automated. Right now, robotics have yet to replace all types of manual labour, particularly complicated tasks that involve the handling of complex materials and objects. Deploying robots for these tasks is necessary to ensure Europe can compete with countries having large labour forces. The EU-funded REMODEL project supports new production environments for manufacturing products with extensive wires and cables. It integrates a dual-arm robot in the production line for routing and fitting with advanced techniques. It will use the former WIRES project’s tools to solve electric wire manipulation issues, as well as add new perception and interaction functions. This will be tested for effectiveness in four industrial cases.
Objective
REMODEL will enable new production environments, where the manufacturing of complex products composed of multiple wires and cables by means of dual-arm robots is not only possible, but fully integrated with the product design chain. This result will be achieved by exploiting the result of a previous project called WIRES, were basic tools for the manipulation of electric wires have been developed. Moreover, new perception and interaction capabilities will be embedded into the robot to be effective in the industrial manufacturing scenario.
REMODEL will bring new opportunities to human-intensive labor manufacturing processes like the one dealing with cables and wires, where the routing and fitting tasks are calling for advanced handling techniques. The REMODEL robotic ability will impact several production scenarios in which human work is widely adopted due to the complexity in the objects, materials and manipulation tasks, characterized unpredictable initial configuration as well as large deformability and plasticity. Activities involving mass production, such as wiring harness manufacturing for automotive and appliances, are moving outside Europe due to the high labour cost and to the repetitiveness of the tasks that produces high psychophysical stress in the workers. In other cases, such as the switchgear wiring and the wiring harness manufacturing for the aerospace sector, the need of increasing production flexibility, reliability and traceability of the product as well as reduce costs and time to market implies the adoption of innovative tools to maintain proper competitiveness and answer the market requests.
To proof the effectiveness of the REMODEL outcomes, four industrial manufacturing use cases provided by the industrial partners and covering five different domains, i.e. the production and assembly of wiring harnesses in the automotive and the aerospace field, the switchgear wiring and the manufacturing of medical consumables, will be developed.
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
40126 Bologna
Italy