The high-mix low-volume (HMLV) market scenario requires constant changes in jobs, materials and machines. This implies the need to build highly flexible and intelligent manufacturing environments, that allow a fast adaption of processes and systems to changing conditions, assuring high product quality with lower production costs and energy consumption. This urges manufacturing industries to re-define their production processes for competitiveness and sustainability. Most of the manufactured components have joints, so welding technologies are identified at European level as key enabling technologies for the development of innovative and sustainable manufacturing processes. Among welding technologies, arc-based accounted for 36% of the total in 2020, highlighting its relevance for major European industries. Traditionally robots have been used in mass production industries performing repetitive tasks at acceptable cost and quality levels, sacrificing flexibility for productivity. The cooperation of multiple robots powered with IA and Data technologies offers new operational capabilities in terms of manoeuvrability and manipulability in several industrial processes. COROB proposes the development of a smart cooperative multi-robotic system for flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing to cover HMLV industrial production needs in the current technological context of Industry 5.0. The system will be human-centered and will integrate advancements in robotics, inspection, monitoring, control and AI developed by consortium partners and 15 external third parties through an Open call. The flexible solution will be validated in 2 semi-industrial pilots for automotive sector (Multi-robot cooperative arc welding) and toolmaking industry (Multi-robot cooperative WAAM (wire arc additive manufacturing) for repairing). It will contribute to resilience, resource saving, circular economy, cost savings and digital supply chain, fostering European industrial competitiveness.

The productivity of the serial production model is compromised by the need to perform changes in the production equipment that cannot support multiple operations in dynamic environments. Low cost labour is no longer an option for EU manufacturers due to the fast rise of wages and the increasing costs of energy and logistics. Manual tasks cannot be fully automated with a good ratio of cost vs robustness using standard robots due to: high product variability, dedicated process equipment and high cost of maintenance by expert users. The answer to this challenge lays in the creation of production concepts that base their operation on the autonomy and collaboration between production resources. The vision of THOMAS is: “to create a dynamically reconfigurable shopfloor utilizing autonomous, mobile dual arm robots that are able to perceive their environment and through reasoning, cooperate with each other and with other production resources including human operators”. The objective of THOMAS are to: - Enable mobility on products and resources. Introducing mobile robots able to navigate in the shopfloor and utilize dexterous tooling to perform multiple operations. - Enabling perception of the task and the environment using a) the individual resource’s and b) collaborative perception by combining sensors of multiple resources - Dynamic balancing of workload. Allowing the resources to communicate over a common network and automatically adjust their behaviour by sharing or reallocating tasks dynamically. - Fast programming and automatic execution of new tasks by a) automatically generating the robot program for new products and b) applying skills over the perceived environment to determine required adaptations - Safe human robot collaboration, eliminating physical barriers, by introducing cognitive abilities that allow the detection of humans and their intentions THOMAS will demonstrate and validate its developments in the automotive and the aeronautics industrial sectors.

The recent trends of mass customization of products and lean approaches impacts production by a drastic reduction of production lot sizes. However, traditional automation and robotics fail to be competitive in such a context since all individual product variant would require a complete automation project. In addition, keeping up with the introduction of robots outside of the traditional sectors require to automate much more complex manual tasks, where again traditional robotics automation fails to provide a good ratio of cost vs robustness, mainly due to the rigidity of existing production equipment in terms of programming and tools The overall objective of the project is to provide a bridge for transferring, demonstrating and validating the latest R&D results in robotics towards different industrial environments proving their applicability and effectiveness. More specifically, VERSATILE will apply dual arm robots in executing complex tasks that are traditionally assigned to humans due to their manipulation requirements. By providing the tools to quickly setup, program and operate innovative robotic systems the end user will have robotic cells flexible enough to automatically adapt to the high number of products variants. In this context the project will focus on advancing the TRL level of the latest developments in the areas of: - Perception for Operation in semi-structured environment - Easy Programming framework to improve the re-configurability/ programmability of the robotic systems - Mobile dual-arm robotics manipulation capabilities - Open frameworks for the ‘Plug and Produce’ based coordination of these resources This will be investigated in three industry driven use cases including both static and mobile dual arm robots. The project will focus on three main applications: - Automotive: assembly of vehicle dashboards at PSA - Aerospace: assembly of aircraft wing parts at AIRBUS - Consumer goods: handling and packaging of shaver handles at BIC

The requirements on production systems are continuously being shifted towards higher flexibility and adaptability. The ReCaM-project will demonstrate at TRL 7 a set of integrated tools for the rapid and autonomous reconfiguration of agile production systems, both at operational as well as managerial levels, integrated with the existing production planning and scheduling tools (MES). This approach is based on intelligent plug-and-produce capable self-describing mechatronic objects, which are able to auto-program and self-adjust to the required task by utilizing parametric capabilities. These next generation flexible production systems and the proposed set of enabling ICT tools will allow a rapid and cost-efficient reaction to dynamic market changes, also in small-lot production contexts, reducing the efforts needed to switch between product types and production quantities. ReCaM-solutions are expected to allow increasing the amount of variants and decreasing the lot sizes by 50% in an economically feasible way. Also, at least 30% reduction in set-up and changeover times and costs are expected. The integrated planning tool will take into consideration the energy consumption of the specific resources and try to minimize it by smart production scheduling, utilization of integrated operating-point switching of mechatronic objects, and reconfiguration. Thus, at least 5% reduction in energy consumption is anticipated. The project will ground on existing de-facto standards and specifications regarding reconfigurable system architectures, resource data models, control architectures and interfaces, and will provide and supplement new specifications for the missing aspects. The ReCaM consortium sees strong involvement of SME’s to RTD and demonstration activities and two end-users from major EU sectors, thus enabling proper exploitation of the demonstrated results worldwide.

The adoption of robots in lower volume, diverse environment is heavily constrained by the high integration and deployment complexity that overshadows the performance benefits of this technology. If robots are to become well accepted across the whole spectra of production industries, real evidence that they can operate in an open, modular and scalable way is needed. ODIN aspires to fill this gap by bringing technology from the latest ground breaking research in the fields of a) collaborating robots and human robot collaborative workplaces b) autonomous robotics and AI based task planning c) mobile robots and reconfigurable tooling, d) Digital Twins and Virtual Commissioning and e) Service Oriented Robotics Integration and Communication Architectures. To strengthen the EU production companies’ trust in utilizing advanced robotics, the vision of ODIN is: “to demonstrate that novel robot-based production systems are not only technically feasible, but also efficient and sustainable for immediate introduction at the shopfloor”. ODIN will achieve this vision through the implementation of Large Scale Pilots consisting of the following components: - Open Component (OC): A small footprint, small scale pilot instance allowing the development, integration and testing of cutting-edge technologies. - Digital Component (DC): A virtual instance of the pilot implementing an accurate Digital Twin representation that allows the commissioning, validation and control of the actual pilot - Industrial Component (IC): A full-scale instance of the pilot, integrating hardware (HW) and software (SW) modules from the Open and Digital components and operating under an actual production environment. - Networked Component (IC): An integration architecture with open interfaces allowing the communication of all robotics HW and control systems through safe and secure means. ODIN will demonstrate its result in 3 Large Scale Pilots in the automotive, white goods and aeronautic sectors.