ACROBA

Context

The fast-changing market trends and customer demands require the manufacturing industries to shorten their time to market to maintain their competitiveness. Customer changing requirements and increased product complexity are largely the most compelling drivers of agile manufacturing industry. It implies for the companies constant reprogramming of production tools and robots, which are costly and time-consuming adaptations, especially for SMEs.

In order to meet this challenge, the ACROBA project will develop generic robotic platforms tailored to the specific needs of the companies that would be the key step to increase their level of automation within agile production and mass customisation scenarios, reducing costs, increasing performance and therefore gaining competitiveness.

Aim

ACROBA project aims to develop and demonstrate an advanced prototype application built over a generic platform, the ACROBA platform. The characteristics of this platform will allow its cost-effective integration and smooth adoption by diverse industrial scenarios to realise their true industrialisation within agile production environments. The platform will depart from the COPRA-AP reference architecture configurable and adaptable to virtually any manufacturing line. This platform will be provided with a decentralised ROS node-based structure to enhance its modularity

Challenge

By using exact figures and production estimates end-users have historically been able to justify an investment in fixed automation. However, the introduction of new automation paradigms associated with HRC applications such as Collaborative, Adaptive, and Sensitive Robotic systems, has led to further confusion about optimal automation strategies and their respective return on investment.

Project Key Figures

• Total budget: 8 M€
• EU funding: 6.9 M€
• Duration: 42 months
• Partners: 17 partners from 9 EU countries (project coordinator: The Bern University of Applied Sciences)

Project Partners

• Berner Fachhochschule (CH)
• BIBA – Bremer Institut Für Produktion Und Logistik GMBH (DE)
• NEC BV (NL)
• Fundacion AITIIP (ES)
• Universidad De La Iglesia De Deusto Entidad Religiosa (ES)
• Pôle EMC2 (FR)
• Cabka Group GmbH (DE)
• Ikor Sistemas Electronicos SL (ES)
• SIGMA Clermont (FR)
• Irish Manufacturing Research Company Limited By Guarantee (IE)
• Nuevas Técnicas De Automatización Industrial, S.L. (ES)
• SteriPack Ireland Ltd (IE)
• STAM SRL (IT)
• ICPE SA (RO)
• Fundacion Centro De Tecnologias De Interaccion Visual Y Comunicaciones Vicomtech (ES)
• Moses Productos SL (ES)
• PRIZZTECH LTD (FI)

THEMATIC PILLAR

Robotics and Automation

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