Objective
Activities in the laundry sector cover washing, steaming and repairing of personal, industrial, medical and recreational laundry. Main bottleneck in the current laundry process, is the manual selection of different types of laundry. This means a high labour intensity; relatively high fault sensitivity and no optimal use of capacity, equipment and transportation. To improve this situation, automation and mechanisation of the process is proposed. On top of this, companies are confronted with increasing external pressures: changing customer demands, stricter environmental legislation, increasing need to improve labour conditions, increasing competition of competitive products and services. To be able to cope with these factors, to reduce costs and to be able to operate in a competitive way, there is a need to automate the sorting steps of the laundry process. Recent progress in identification, recognition and sorting technologies, opens up the way for the development of an automated laundry system. The general goals of proposed project: - quality improvement, time and costs saving through reduction of sorting faults - optimal use of capacity through reduction of rewash and optimal logistics - achieve high flexibility to meet changing customer demands and changing workforce - improvement of insight in the process and of the labour conditions These goals are to be achieved by: - development of an identification, recognition & sorting system (hardware & software), based on state of the art chip technology - development of handling equipment, aimed at processing professional clothing (overalls, etc.) - development of training programmes to effectively apply the new system in laundries - actual implementation of the new system The proposed projects consists of four major parts: I) development of an non-oriented identification system, 2) development of a sorting system, 3) integration into an automated laundry sorting system and 4) testing of the system. The main part of the developed system will be universally applicable in European laundries, leading to the described goals. The envisaged project would have a budget of approx. 900 kECU and should last for two years. With at least 4 end users (laundries in NL, DE, B. ...) two hardware partners, the new system is developed, tested and jointly implemented, supported by a seventh partner, specialized in training and education. An external project manager will secure progress and concrete project results
Fields of science
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
EAW - Exploratory awardsCoordinator
4462 GE Goes
Netherlands