The project focuses on the design of robots capable of handling soft and deformable materials in the manufacturing industry, thus reducing the involvement of human activity in these processes. Four industrial partners from four key different manufacturing sectors: toys, textile, footwear and tyres, take part in the SOFTMANBOT project. These industrial partners have their own production lines with an implemented technology which is different from each other. Due to this, the use cases definition and system requirements was accomplished in order to develop the technology which gives a solution adapted to the different cases. Moreover, the performance assessment metrics from the four cases and the global definition of Hardware and Software architecture have been already developed.
One of the pillars of the SOFTMANBOT project is to develop an advanced perception system with the objective of tracking the state of the product and collaborating with human operators. In this field, a wide variety of both visual and tactile sensors have been studied and tested, looking for the solution which fits in the best way the requirements of the different use-cases. In human-robot collaboration the interface of the robot which connects all the sensors and allows the interaction between the human and the machine has been developed.
It is important to control the deformation of the product (shape servoing) and the contact forces applied (contact servoing) in order not to produce any damage in the manipulation of the products. In this field, excellent advances have been carried out. Regarding the shape servoing some geometric models have been studied and in contact servoing an approach based on inverse Finite Element Model (FEM) was developed. A great progress has been also performed in the human-robot collaboration: the State of the Art has been studied and a haptic glove was used for the measurement of the user's motion information, also providing force and vibrotactile feedback to the user. Finally, the State of The Art of task generalisation through robotic skills based on AI has been studied. All of this contributes to the progress of the second pillar of the SOFTMANBOT project.
In the SOFTMANBOT project it is crucial to design robots which can handle soft and deformable products with different shapes. Due to this, the first prototypes of innovative dexterous grippers with smart mechanical design have been designed and developed, considering the specific requirements of the different use-cases. The prototypes of the grippers have been delivered to relevant partners. These partners will give the feedback in order to get the final version of them. Due to the design of the grippers, sensors for tracking the products could be mounted on them.
With the objective of recreating the environment of the four different use-cases and studying the technologies developed in the SOFTMANBOT project, the preliminary recreation of mock-up use cases and the design of the robotic cells have been started. To study the technological developments, simplified tests have been also developed, and the test planning was defined.
SOFTMANBOT is a European project that involves partners from four different European countries and which will contribute to a great development in the industrial sector. Due to this, it is crucial to collect data from the end user in order to minimise the risk of adoption of this technology in industrial companies and also obtaining quantitative indicators that support the potential to bring back production to Europe and the improvement of work environment and safety conditions of the employees. In this field a wide number of questionnaires have been designed and carried out focused on collecting information from both workers and final consumers.
