The COGNIMAN project arises from the growing need for highly flexible, efficient, and human-centric manufacturing processes in response to the growing market dynamics with increasing global competitions and rapid technological advances. Manufacturing industries in Europe is facing severe challenges such as an increasing low-cost competitions, shortage of high-skilled personnel and growing strict standards on environmental and climate footprint. Therefore, there is an urgent need to integrate AI, robotics, and digital technologies, as critical solutions for boosting their competitiveness and enhancing productivity while ensuring safety and sustainability. These solutions will not only secure jobs in EU manufacturing, but will also improve welfare at work from dirty and dull tasks with safer and more inclusive work environment, so called smart manufacturing.
COGNIMAN aims to contribute to this smart manufacturing by establishing sustainable solutions for focused areas. It aims at conceptualising models, simulation mechanisms, and digital twins for controlling and optimising manufacturing operation parameters. It also targets at developing and integrating advanced sensing systems and robust, explainable machine learning for enhanced flexible manufacturing control at reduced waste. The overall concept exhibits a human-centric design, which creates user-friendly, safety-enhanced collaborative robotics. Through multidisciplinary integration of models, simulations, sensors, actuators, and AI, COGNIMAN will develop and validate the solution in four pilot trials. Additionally, it seeks to establish open-access pilots for knowledge sharing and extend the solution to other manufacturing scenarios though a comprehensive exploitation strategy, including IPR management and replicability.
Summing-up, COGNIMAN is devoted to boosting the competitiveness and leadership of the EU manufacturing sector by providing a solution to enable safe, flexible, reconfigurable, and efficient smart manufacturing. The integration and validation of breakthrough technologies with a huiman-centric design will bring improvements in production processes, environmental benefits, better working conditions, reduced production costs and lower waste.
