Project description
Automatisation for faster and safer slate production
Europe’s slate industry is about to go high-tech to improve production and protect the health of the workers. Currently, slate production relies heavily on manual labour, which has a major impact on quality control, working conditions and the final price. The EU-funded optiSLATER project aims to inject advanced automation technology in the sector. With the use of computer vision and artificial intelligence, it is developing an automated system to recover and analyse entire slate batches in seconds. It will offer six-times faster categorisation than traditional manual labour to increase production by five-fold. It will also ensure that workers are not exposed to the dangerous slate dust.
Objective
Slate manufacturing heavily relies on subjective and costly manual work for the quality control and categorization of its products during which the price of the final product is defined. Due to the subjectivity of this manual process and the labor shortage dur to hard and harmful working conditions (carcinogenic components), this industry is urgently requiring accurate, unbiased and automated classification systems, able to reduce production costs, increase productivity, competitiveness and traceability but also improving the working conditions of the employees.
In ITCN (Spain, 2016) we are working for bringing technology to the traditional slate sector. We have developed optiSLATER: the first automated classification system for slate slabs. It provides for the first time an unbiased and consistent categorization of slate slabs x6 times faster than the manual process while guaranteeing the traceability of the final products. Based on computer vision & artificial intelligence algorithms, optiSLATER retrieves and analyze in a few seconds all the relevant parameters to classify the slabs solving the subjectivity of this crucial process w. Besides, it allows the full traceability of the products as it generates a report with all the classification parameters per slate batch as well as a code bar. optiSLATER can increase x5 the productivity of the slate manufacturing companies (46,000 slabs vs. 9,200 manual classification in a shift) avoiding the contact of the employees to the harmful slate dust. optiSLATER can be assembled with our own packaging and palletizingunits to offer a complete automated solution to for the final slate processing steps.
Based on direct sales, we will offer optiSLATER to the European slate manufacturing companies (B2B) expecting to gain more than 100 customers after the first 3 years of commercialization. It will represent €9,1M in cumulative profits (ROI of 4,2, breaking even in less than 1,5 years) while hiring at least 4 new employees.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputer vision
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learningdeep learning
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
36713 PONTEVEDRA
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.