AGILEHAND Project will develop advanced technologies for grading, handling and packaging autonomously soft and deformable products, as a strategic instrument to improve flexibility, agility and reconfigurability of production and logistic systems of the European manufacturing companies. AGILEHAND project aims at developing innovative solutions for three key aspects of a workpiece handling system:
• The "grading" aspect, i.e. knowledge of the workpiece's characteristics and condition. In particular, the project focuses on a self-calibrating sensing solution for producing a mesh of integrated and overlapping sensors that will improve production-line traceability, agility and reconfigurability. The main gains will be a cost effective, accurate and fast solution to finely grade the quality of delicate and perishable products.
• The “handling” aspect of soft and deformable products during the Sorting, Handling and Packaging stages. The AGILEHAND project addresses the problems of robotic manipulation, not in the factory setting, but in a more human-oriented environment, where objects are diverse, deformable, and delicate.
• Aspects of agility, flexibility and reconfigurability in production lines. To build a set of solutions for Agile Production Line Reconfiguration in a mixed-model production system. These AI based solutions, will allow for monitoring, adaptive control and synchronisation of production and logistics flows in a factory, even when faced with a variability of products, production mix or fresh market, guaranteeing high performance in customer response time, and an efficient use of resources.
In particular, AGILEHAND Project will create three AGILEHAND SUITES as Key Exploitable Results (KERs) that concern Smart Sensing Technologies (WP4), Self-Adaptive Handling, Sorting and Packaging Technologies (WP5) and Agile, Flexible and Rapid Reconfigurable Technologies (WP6). These SUITES are made up of 10 new technological solutions (Other Exploitable Results - OERs) as shown in Figure 1.
Moreover, AGILEHAND project aims to:
- Design the AGILEHAND Framework and deliver the Reference Architecture for smart manufacturing and devised using multiple perspectives, related to business, usage, functional and implementation viewpoints (WP3).
- Test and validate the AGILEHAND Solutions in 4 use cases that differ in characteristics of the surface, deformability, and consistency of the products to be handled (WP7).
- Integrate Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) aspects to keep a human-centric approach when design solution (WP2).