Project description
Bringing humans and robots together in industry
Throughout various industries, robotics is now widely commonplace. However, the application of robots in industrial tasks is often met with challenges, chief among which are cost, lack of flexibility and their limited ability to work alongside humans. The EU-funded CONCERT project will develop the technologies necessary to make configurable robot platforms a reality. It will achieve this by designing the next generation of flexible, synergistic and modular robots capable of advanced tasks while being able to autonomously and seamlessly collaborate with human workers. The technologies will initially be applied in the construction industry, with the goal of revolutionising robotics across the industrial spectrum.
Objective
CONCERT has a clear focus on developing robotics technologies aiming at a novel concept of configurable robot platforms, which can be explored in application domains with unstructured, variable and evolving workspace settings and tasks.
It targets to make a step transition from the current general-purpose lower power collaborative robots to a new generation of collaborative platforms that can safely collaborate in tasks with demanding human-scale forces while ensuring safety on the fly, implement efficient collaboration principles and demonstrate quick adaptability to address less standardized and more unstructured environment and task settings.
It proposes the development of a new paradigm of high power/strength, adaptable, collaborative robots, which leverages on modular and configurable robot hardware with adaptive physical capabilities. automatic deployment of control and online safety verification methods. Multi-modal and multi-state perception and supervision tools provides enhanced human, robot and task execution awareness enabling the implementation of adaptive shared autonomy and role allocation planning in human robot collaboration.
The development of the CONCERT technologies is steered by use-case scenarios from the construction industry, a sector with significantly high socio-economic impact, offering at the same time an extremely challenging, yet highly motivating and pertinent domain for demonstrating and validating the quick deployment and interoperability features of the CONCERT configurable collaborative robotic solutions. The project technologies will be therefore validated in relevant construction task activities exhibiting high payloads and diverse workspace size and settings, thus requiring different robot arrangements to perform them. The assessment methodology considers several indicators covering the technical, functional, occupational, labor effort, and societal aspects and impacts of the CONCERT technologies.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
16163 Genova
Italy