The VOJEXT project has been a 48 months innovation action project co-funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 (grant agreement No 952197) under the domain of the Factories of the Future. VOJEXT started on July 1st 2020, driven by 19 partners from 14 European countries including large, medium and small manufacturing companies, large construction company, SME associations, DIHs, ICT consultants, robot manufacturer, research centers, and universities.
The VOJEXT project aimed at providing a next generation of mobile cobots linked to a technological framework that supports Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and cognitive autonomous systems. In this context, VOJEXT has developed a flexible and customizable modular suite of services that brings high-level, cognitive and perceptual as well as low-level control modules that allow to use robots in complex manufacturing and construction environments; enabling safety, business, and interoperability with physical manufacturing processes.
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VOJEXT uses the Value Of Joint Experimentation in digital Technologies and engages with artists for dynamizing science-driven industry approaches, enabling the design, development, and demonstration of affordable, market-oriented, easy-to-repurpose mobile cobots and safety-driven human-robot interaction.
VOJEXT focuses on the industrial sector, especially in the manufacturing and construction domains, aiming at involving SMEs and mid-caps that wish to integrate and experiment with more advanced digital and robotic practices in these sectors.
Through this approach, VOJEXT aims at enabling a more favourable business environment, and link with the Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH) and SME associations to support more effective sociotechnical and business ecosystems.
The following six specific objectives support the overall strategic goal:
• To develop an advanced Cyber-Physical System (CPS) with high-level reasoning that supports an effective and efficient management, control, and supervision of the manufacturing production process; involving mobile manipulation of objects/devices in production.
• To provide a beyond state-of-the-art modular mobile cobot system for human-robot collaboration.
• To foster a ground-breaking standardised perceptual system allowing accurate and safe navigation, movements, and human-robot collaboration by taking advantage from sensors and IoT devices deployed in the operational environments.
• To design a proactive safety preservation and ergonomic optimisation approach with adaptability/personalisation to gender, age, cognitive, and physical capacities; linked to co-working environments.
• To integrate, test, and validate the VOJEXT components, in additional experimental pilots as use case demonstrators, to be awarded through two open calls.
• To strengthen the European industry, stimulating the adoption of advanced technologies in the field of cognitive and autonomous systems and robotics, by SMEs and mid-caps through DIHs.
