Recent years have been marked by global scale occurrences including economic crisis and an unprecedented pandemic which have provided tremendous challenges on the manufacturing firms that had to rethink their production and business models. Under the new reality, reconfiguration has to consider many more dimensions than a simple rescheduling of pending orders. The production system itself needs to adopt both human and automated resources that can work together seamlessly or mutually exchange tasks, allowing the execution of any process plan in more than one, non-predetermined ways.
Thankfully, over the last decade, significant breakthroughs have been achieved on the technological enablers that can support flexible production in smart factory setups.
The CONVERGING project, as an Innovation Action, aspires to bring together a team of “Best in Class” experts that can combine all the aforementioned technological enablers to:
“Develop, deploy, validate and promote smart and reconfigurable production systems including multiple autonomous agents (collaborative robots, AGVs, humans) that are able to act in diverse production environments. The diversifying factors will be a multi-level AI based cognition (line, station, resource levels) which will exploit the collective perception (Digital Pipeline) of these resources, allowing them to interact with each other and seamlessly coexist with humans under a «social industrial environment» that ensures trustful, safe and inclusive user experience”
The proposed HRC, AI, Big Data and technologies will be tested against robustness, efficiency and acceptance in production sectors of Automotive (FORD), Aircraft Production (IAI), White Goods (ELUX) and Additive Manufacturing products processing (PRIMA)
The workplan of CONVERGING has as a target to comply with the following 5 objectives:
Objective O1: Implementing a highly reconfigurable production system by deploying collaborative robotics and smart mechatronic devices, relying on multi-level AI to achieve autonomy
Objective O2: Providing open and standard means to interconnect all production entities (Big Data pipeline) for real time capturing (Digital Twin), storing (Data at Rest) and processing (Data in Motion) to support autonomous and collaborative behaviour with minimal user intervention
Objective O3: Establishing a human centered social-industrial environment where all activities and interactions with humans are dynamically shaped to maximize user experience, trust, skills & safety
Objective O4: Providing the software and hardware interfaces to ensure safe and seamless interaction with collaborative robotic solutions, minimizing learning curves and setup times
Objective O5: Create innovation ecosystem through a network of open Pilot Lines- involving robotic application stakeholders, SMEs and RTOs to inspire further development and deployment
