Europe’s manufacturing sector is facing a number of challenges.To be competitive, and survive in global market, manufacturing companies need to be more efficient. Manufacturing competitiveness means keeping the existing companies in Europe and bringing back manufacturing companies to Europe. The final result for the citizen is reflected in jobs creation, economic growth and better living standards.
Robot technology, due to their capabilities, is a key element to address such challenges and improve manufacturing competitiveness. Traditional robots have the capacity to perform repetitive work, be (re)programmable and highly accurate. However, the problem is that it is still difficult to interact, (re)configure and integrate robots in manufacturing cells, especially mobile manipulators. In addition, traditional robots have limited autonomy and cognition abilities to perceive and adapt to unstructured industrial environments. They work inside fences and the interaction and collaboration with human workers is very limited or inexistent. All these factors contribute to decisively limit the flexibility of robots and their penetration in companies. The consequence is that many manufacturing companies, especially SMEs, do not have robots on their shop floor because they do not have workers to operate such robotic systems. This is critical as more than 99% of all European business are SMEs, providing 2 out of 3 of the private sector jobs and are the primarily responsible for wealth and economic growth. Moreover, robot technology is fundamental to ensure the Europe’s work force for the growth of the industry and to attenuate the effect of an ageing workforce.
Mobile collaborative robotics manipulator which is a part the Industry 4.0 initiative bring an answer to theses challenges. In this context, as an Innovative Action, the overall aim of the ColRobot project is to develop a collaborative mobile robotic manipulator for industrial assembly and assistance in kitting in automotive and aerospace industries. A “third hand” capable of delivering kits, tools, parts, and holding work pieces for the operator.
ColRobot focuses on four objectives:
1.To address the Human/Robot Collaboration challenging issues from the need of the shop-floor flexibility and agility
2.To develop key technologies for collaborative mobile robotic manipulator
3.To validate them to a high level of TRL through two use cases one for automotive and one for aerospace
4.To address some safety industrial software and hardware robotic issues
Another important parallel objective is the education of the manufacturing engineering and research community of ColRobot results to improve and harmonise knowledge about mobile collaborative robotic manipulator for industry and thereby ensure a high impact of project results.
The knowledge and industrial technologies generated in ColRobot will contribute to improve EU manufacturing policy, to increase the leadership of the EU in safety mobile robotic manipulator and to contribute more generally to improve the safety issues in Human Robot Collaboration. Moreover, ColRobot will prove that robots can interact and collaborate with human workers in an industrial environment, performing repetitive work and freeing the operators from ergonomically inconvenient work. Such context will conduct to job opportunities for an ever-ageing population (with reduced cognitive abilities), as well as for people with learning disabilities and no language skills.
