Rossini Project, among the 7 European projects on Human Robot Collaboration

Over the last years both Research and Industry have tried to address the requirement for flexible production by introducing technologies that allow humans and robots to coexist and share production tasks. The benefits of implementing this production paradigm lays in the implementation of flexible and highly reconfigurable production systems which can easily change their operation to accommodate different product families, similar to the way that a human operator would do.

In this direction, the latest trends of European Research foster the integration of new forms of interaction between robots and workers aiming to make the most out of the synergy effect. This means to efficiently combine and exploit the robot’s precision, repeatability and strength with the human’s intelligence and flexibility.

Currently, there are 7 EU projects that are addressing the topic of Human Robot Collaboration (HRC) targeting on industrial applications in different manufacturing domains.

The objective is to increase the maturity of technologies developed and validated in laboratory by deploying and demonstrating prototypes in real or relevant manufacturing environments.

Each project addresses human-robot collaboration in different market sectors, and therefore they will explore new business models and means to overcome the lagging adaptation of robotics in manufacturing. A key element to such adaptation will be the reproducibility of the research results in more use-cases.

These projects came together under a fruitful workshop, organized by European Commission, targeted on illustrating potential benefits of funding research and innovation on robotics. The identification of consolidated and emerging technology trends was a core activity. The findings in each of the projects will provide policy recommendations on measures to maximise the environmental, economic and societal impacts. Partners exchanged information and early insights from their respective projects, to map the fields where technology and experience can be transferred among the researchers. The results of this workshop will be formulated as basis for a report on robotics performed by European Commission that will be published before the end of this year.

Among the various Europeans in progress, the Rossini Project (RObot enhanced SenSing, Intelligence and actuation to Improve job quality in manufacturing), to which IMA Group collaborates, aims to develop a disruptive, inherently safe hardware-software platform for the design and deployment of human-robot collaboration (HRC) applications in manufacturing.