The European Sharework project, coordinated by the Eurecat technology centre, has picked up the award for ‘Best Automated Production and Robotic Integration’ at the Advanced Manufacturing Madrid fair for its development of a new smart system for safe and ergonomic collaboration between robots and workers in industrial manufacturing processes harnessing artificial intelligence and process data analytics.
The project has developed flexible software made up of 14 technological modules “to furnish robots and their control systems with the intelligence required to work closely with operators with no need for physical protection barriers,” says Daniel Serrano, director of Eurecat’s Robotics and Automation Unit.
The system “can understand the environment and human actions by drawing on a knowledge base and sensors and then make predictions about future status,” adds Néstor García, the project’s technical coordinator and head of Collaborative Robotics in Eurecat’s Robotics and Automation Unit. “It then gets the robot to act accordingly with the ultimate goal of driving collaborative work between operators and robots and thus enhancing operator ergonomics and ramping up process productivity’.
As part of the project “we’ve looked at all the tasks involved in each use case and identified which are the most repetitive with little added value for people,” explains Sharework project coordinator Simona Neri. “This means we can shift them to the robot’s area of responsibility and ensure robot and operator can work together safely.”
Sharework, funded within the Horizon 2020 call, is run by a consortium made up by 15 partners. They are six research institutions (Eurecat, Fraunhofer IWU, the Italian National Research Council, the University of Patras, the University of Darmstadt and the RWTH Aachen University); eight industrial partners, of which four are industrial companies (STRANE, STAM, INTRASOFT and MCM), and four end users (SEAT S.A., ALSTOM, CEMBRE and GO) along with a standardisation organisation (UNE).
