Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TRINITY (Digital Technologies, Advanced Robotics and increased Cyber-security for Agile Production in Future European Manufacturing Ecosystems)
Période du rapport: 2021-07-01 au 2023-06-30
Agile manufacturing refers to the ability of businesses to respond quickly to customer needs with new product development and delivery to market. The demand for industrial robots, collaborative robotics and flexible systems is anticipated to be growing to 65 billion euros by the year 2023. The level of desired collaboration and increased flexibility will only be reached if the systems are developed as a whole, e.g. perception, reasoning, and physical manipulation. In TRINITY it was recognized that the rising need for collaborative robots in the automation industry is acting as a driver for this market and is expected to serve as a market opportunity for future growth. However, at the same time especially smaller companies have difficulties to formulate a concrete vision and strategies for the uptake of robotics, find skilled workforce to develop and deploy the robot systems, and/or work in the manufacturing industry. The EU-funded TRINITY project tackled this challenge by creating a network of multidisciplinary and synergistic local digital innovation hubs focused on agile production with the aim of speeding up the knowledge and technology transfer.
The main objective of TRINITY was to create a network of multidisciplinary and synergistic local digital innovation hubs (DIHs) composed of research centres, companies, and university groups that cover a wide range of topics that can contribute to agile production: advanced robotics as the driving force and digital tools, data privacy and cyber security technologies to support the introduction of advanced robotic systems in the production processes. The result achieved was one-stop shop for methods and tools to achieve highly intelligent, agile, and reconfigurable production, which will ensure Europe’s welfare in the future. The second objective of TRINITY was to develop a sustainable business model for the network. The TRINITY network of DIHS offered training and consulting services, including support for business planning and access to financing. Services of participating DIHs and dissemination of information to wider public is provided through a digital access point.
The third objective of TRINITY was to make the industry aware of the possibilities of the robotics solutions in the manufacturing sector and help the companies to deploy these faster. To increase the deployment of robotics in each priority application area TRINITY approach consisted of different sets of concrete use case demonstrations highly relevant to the manufacturing sector.
The main objective of TRINITY was to create a network of multidisciplinary and synergistic local digital innovation hubs (DIHs) composed of research centres, companies, and university groups that cover a wide range of topics that can contribute to agile production: advanced robotics as the driving force and digital tools, data privacy and cyber security technologies to support the introduction of advanced robotic systems in the production processes. The result achieved was one-stop shop for methods and tools to achieve highly intelligent, agile, and reconfigurable production, which will ensure Europe’s welfare in the future. The second objective of TRINITY was to develop a sustainable business model for the network. The TRINITY network of DIHS offered training and consulting services, including support for business planning and access to financing. Services of participating DIHs and dissemination of information to wider public is provided through a digital access point.
The third objective of TRINITY was to make the industry aware of the possibilities of the robotics solutions in the manufacturing sector and help the companies to deploy these faster. To increase the deployment of robotics in each priority application area TRINITY approach consisted of different sets of concrete use case demonstrations highly relevant to the manufacturing sector.
As TRINITY aims at becoming the central institution for cooperation and technology transfer between academia and industry in flexible automation and robotic systems, one strategic mission will be the dissemination of the results to the scientific community, to end users and to the producers of the technology.
During the first period TRINITY has started to built the community via social media presence, organisation of thematic workshops, seminars and DeepDive events for the industry and academia. The main focus has been on the development of the core content of the TRINITY that are the 18 use case demonstrations and the 32 modules the use case demonstrations are using. From the early beginnings of the project, the Digital Access Point (DAP) has been set up. Through this portal, all the news, events, press releases will be published and widely available to the public.
During the 2nd period the focus has been on extending the TRINITY network via open calls, match-making events, seminars and other dissemination events. Special focus was paid to the 3rd objective e.g. the delivery of the critical mass of use case demonstrations. The demonstrations were modularised to be more user friendly and re-usable for the industrial partners. Each of these included set-up and training material published as video tutorials. The Digital Access Point was opened and the use case demonstrations and modules from the partners, 3rd parties in the demonstration program 1 and TRINITY community members can now publish their work in the DAP. The TRINITY publications, 14 are open access publications (with max 6 months embargo) and these have been also published in universities own open access collections and e.g. research gate. The collaboration with the sister projects is going on steadily.
During the 3rd period the focus was on the completion of the demonstration program 2 results, deployment of the new networking functionalities to the Digital Access Point (DAP) including the finalisation of the free educational material (e.g. final versions of the tutorials) related to the internal demonstrators and building of the solid foundation to the TRINITY network. TRINITY resulted over 30 open access publications during its runtime, and several will appear post-project about the TRINITY results. The third objective of TRINITY was to make the industry aware of the possibilities of the robotics solutions in the manufacturing sector and help the companies to deploy these faster. To increase the deployment of robotics in each priority application area TRINITY approach consisted of different sets of concrete use case demonstrations highly relevant to the manufacturing sector. In the beginning TRINITY core partners introduced 18 use case demonstrations originating from the industrial needs as the examples where and how the emerging technology can be applied. The TRINITY started its operation by developing demonstrators in the areas of robotics we identified as the most promising to advance agile production, e.g. collaborative robotics including sensory systems to ensure safety, effective user interfaces based on augmented reality and speech, reconfigurable robot workcells and peripheral equipment, programming by demonstration, IoT, secure wireless networks, etc. These demonstrators served as reference implementation for two rounds of open calls for application experiments, where companies with agile production needs and sound business plans will be supported by TRINITY DIHs to advance their manufacturing processes. As a result TRINITY formed a solid pathway from laboratory level concepts to the functional prototypes, speeding up the technology uptake and return of the investments.
During the first period TRINITY has started to built the community via social media presence, organisation of thematic workshops, seminars and DeepDive events for the industry and academia. The main focus has been on the development of the core content of the TRINITY that are the 18 use case demonstrations and the 32 modules the use case demonstrations are using. From the early beginnings of the project, the Digital Access Point (DAP) has been set up. Through this portal, all the news, events, press releases will be published and widely available to the public.
During the 2nd period the focus has been on extending the TRINITY network via open calls, match-making events, seminars and other dissemination events. Special focus was paid to the 3rd objective e.g. the delivery of the critical mass of use case demonstrations. The demonstrations were modularised to be more user friendly and re-usable for the industrial partners. Each of these included set-up and training material published as video tutorials. The Digital Access Point was opened and the use case demonstrations and modules from the partners, 3rd parties in the demonstration program 1 and TRINITY community members can now publish their work in the DAP. The TRINITY publications, 14 are open access publications (with max 6 months embargo) and these have been also published in universities own open access collections and e.g. research gate. The collaboration with the sister projects is going on steadily.
During the 3rd period the focus was on the completion of the demonstration program 2 results, deployment of the new networking functionalities to the Digital Access Point (DAP) including the finalisation of the free educational material (e.g. final versions of the tutorials) related to the internal demonstrators and building of the solid foundation to the TRINITY network. TRINITY resulted over 30 open access publications during its runtime, and several will appear post-project about the TRINITY results. The third objective of TRINITY was to make the industry aware of the possibilities of the robotics solutions in the manufacturing sector and help the companies to deploy these faster. To increase the deployment of robotics in each priority application area TRINITY approach consisted of different sets of concrete use case demonstrations highly relevant to the manufacturing sector. In the beginning TRINITY core partners introduced 18 use case demonstrations originating from the industrial needs as the examples where and how the emerging technology can be applied. The TRINITY started its operation by developing demonstrators in the areas of robotics we identified as the most promising to advance agile production, e.g. collaborative robotics including sensory systems to ensure safety, effective user interfaces based on augmented reality and speech, reconfigurable robot workcells and peripheral equipment, programming by demonstration, IoT, secure wireless networks, etc. These demonstrators served as reference implementation for two rounds of open calls for application experiments, where companies with agile production needs and sound business plans will be supported by TRINITY DIHs to advance their manufacturing processes. As a result TRINITY formed a solid pathway from laboratory level concepts to the functional prototypes, speeding up the technology uptake and return of the investments.
TRINITY delivered 4 concrete results. The first result is the Digital Access Point that hosts the use case demonstrations and descriptions of modules with links to the additional material and the network collaboration space for users to offer other service and to find suitable partners. The second concrete result of the TRINTIY is the moodle based TRINITY training portal, that hosts the tutorials on how to use, apply and develop further these technologies outlined in the TRINITY. And as the third main result TRINITY established the TRINITY network for robotics in agile manufacturing, which will continue to facilitate the collaboration post-project. The fourth concrete result the TRINITY delivered was the the best practices on how to apply robotics for agile production e.g. 18 internal use case demonstration and 37 external use case demonstrations. The external use case demonstration validated the internal use case solutions and provided additional solutions for the field of robotics. The 37 consortia, totaling 108 partners delivered revenue over 7 million euros by the end of the implementation phase, found 119 new customers, opened 33 new job positions and created 256 new business connections.