HORSE components and technologies innovate and address real industrial challenges, and at the same time validate novel approaches for digitizating and automatizing manufacturing:
• Robotic agents enhanced with practical aspects to allow easy integration in working environments, controlled by MPMS.
• MPMS orchestrates the control of both human and robotic agents. It also supports production planning and minimizes changeovers.
• Middleware adopts existing protocols and standards, such as ROS, OSGi, OPC UA and connect cyber and physical layers.
• Robotic agents used in real industrial tasks and enhanced with global safety features, and better monitoring and control.
• Adaptive collision detection detects obstacles in the workspace, in the robot trajectory.
• Hybrid Task Supervisor, at the local task execution of both human and robots agents, receives task requests and keeps track of the execution progress, through a user-friendly GUI.
• The industrial robots have been enhanced with safety features previously found only on less demanding collaborative robots.
• Enhanced situation awareness: at the level of robot environment-related data, robot position and information about its planned trajectory are considered to reselect the trajectory in case of potential collision. At the level of workcell identifies ‘out-of-normal’ situations. A the level of production line relies on environment data representation and analysis, triggering decisions to agents based on reasoning.
• A position-force control system eases the robot task programming and allows safe human-robot interaction, with better performance in trajectory tracking and force control.
• Safety standards have been reviewed in terms of the above mentioned contributions
• The Augmented Reality system supports intuitive task instructions, enabling non-expert workers to perform tasks, previously requiring extensive experience.
• The Learning by Demonstration functionalities allow the robot to be programmed easier and faster than with traditional programming.
• Task instructions and alerts are now delivered more comprehensively and effectively in electronic format.
The project paved new way of I4MS objectives to promote robotics in the European SMEs:
• Demonstrations target existing and unresolved challenges of the factories and are motivating for other SMEs to adopt them. HORSE solutions are replicable in other factories, as confirmed by the feasibility studies of DIHs.
• CCs in 5 regions have been equipped with competences, demonstration scenarios, new business approach promoting HORSE framework.
• 7 experiments mentored by HORSE adopted the FWK and demonstrated valuable case studies.
