Automation and Robotics for EUropean Sustainabile manufacturing

Objective

European Factories of the Future will have to be smart and green:
• SMART: high performance, reconfigurable, adaptive and evolving factories based on robotic technologies ,
• GREEN: reduced ecological footprint through a more efficient use, at factory level, of material and energy resources.
Industrial Robotics is the strategic technology needed to keep the European Manufacturing leading edge, unfortunately it is intrinsically energy intensive, and its massive adoption compromises factories’ sustainability. The AREUS project objective is to overcome this limitation providing an innovative integrated technology and engineering platform, intrinsically interdisciplinary, modular and configurable based on four innovations:
1. An integrated set of Energy Consumption reduction technologies (R-ECO) based on a novel factory electrical power supply system to exchange, harvest, store and recover energy at factory level improving the use of renewable energy sources
2. A Robotic production systems Integrated Design and simulation environment (R-ID) for the eco-efficient design of robotic plants focused on the simulation of energy flows under a co-evolving product-process-robotic production systems approach
3. A Robotic manufacturing processes OPTimization environment (R-OPT) for the optimal sustainable production scheduling under a control engineering approach
4. LCA methods(R-LCA) to assess and optimize both environmental and economic costs linked with the flows of Material, Energy and Waste (MEW) of co-evolving products and processes realized with robotic production systems
These building blocks will enable the modular and scalable/progressive development of singularly optimized sustainable robotic manufacturing applications (or the re-adaptation of existing production facilities) and will be demonstrated on 7 industrial case studies for their future exploitment.

Field of science

• /social sciences/economics and business/economics/sustainable economy
• /engineering and technology/electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering/electrical engineering/control engineering
• /engineering and technology/environmental engineering/energy and fuels/renewable energy
• /engineering and technology/electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering/electronic engineering/robotics

Programme(s)

• FP7-NMP - Specific Programme "Cooperation": Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and new Production Technologies

Topic(s)

• FoF.NMP.2013-1 - Improved use of renewable resources at factory level

Call for proposal

FP7-2013-NMP-ICT-FOF(RTD)
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Coordinator

Participants (11)