In the reported period the project industrial impact is supported by large industrial partners (VCC, ABB, ACI, IDK) and SMEs (PRO, PRD, SAN, AMS, ROB) that allocates substantial resources to market dissemination (WP6) and exploitation (WP7) activities.
The project supports widespread adoption of robots by SMEs resulting in productivity improvements and therefore provides a competitive advantage to the European economy as a whole. This competitive advantage supports the re-shoring of industrial activities to Europe and contribute to Europe’s job creation and economic recovery: the technology developed in the project contributes a rebalancing of world manufacturing economics, enabling traditionally higher labour rate countries to compete in world markets. Greater competiveness results in increased sales of manufactured products leading to increased number of manufacturing jobs and creates higher paying support jobs.
This project also contributes to the development of a regulatory framework around human-robot collaborative systems and provide input to European Technologies Platforms and PPPs such as EURobotics PPP.
The project scientific impact is supported by the academic and research partners (KTH, MTA, LMS, HIS, VTT, IPA) and rests on a rich set of scientific dissemination activities. This project influences the robotics research community by focusing attention on human-robot interaction and fenceless environments (and away from traditional safeguarding and clearance aspects). Specifically, it is expected that the project key innovations (programming-free methodology, safety policy-guided sensor-driven task planning/re-planning, active collision avoidance supported by sensor-driven 3D models) have a durable impact on robotics hardware and software research. The project also influences the legal framework of human-robot workplace collaboration. As current standards are insufficient (ISO and safe-regulation norms do not have legal character), compliance with safety measures does not provide protection from legal risk. Also, the more autonomous a robot is, the more its actions are unpredictable, which raises concerns about the foreseeability of the robot’s behaviour in certain situations and dangers arising from it. Human-robot collaboration therefore requires new legal options for employees (refusal to work or right for hazard pay), new methods for the protection of workers and in general, new regulations.
The project societal impact results from addressing specific challenges such as health & safety (H2020 societal challenge No. 1) and resource conservation (H2020 societal challenge No. 5).
