A robot for the automotive and aerospace industries will be tested in Porto
17th January 2019
The tests will take place in one of the INESC TEC’s lab dedicated to industrial robotics, located at Hipercentro (Rua Dr. Eduardo Santos Silva, nº 261, 4200-293 Porto – GPS coordinates: 41°10'43.5"N 8°35'18.7"W).
ColRobot combines state-of-the-art technology developed in Europe with user requirements for application in assembly processes, thus creating an integrated collaboration robotics system, where a mobile manipulator acts as a “third hand” by delivering kits, tools, parts, or by holding work pieces while the operator performs tasks.
The robots, being capable of navigating through the factory in an autonomous way, will be used in the automotive and aerospace industries.
As far as the automotive industry is concerned – a demonstration that will take place in Portugal next Tuesday - , this robot presents a number of advantages, namely in terms of the assembly of van parts, to the elimination/reduction and exposure to poor ergonomic conditions and to the autonomy to perform assembly operations.
Regarding the aerospace industry, the benefits are mostly related to the support in the preparation of kits for satellite assembly operations, to the delivery of assembly kits directly to the satellite assembly areas, and as a “third hand” in the assistance of the operator for the installation of equipment on satellite.
“ColRobot will have a huge impact on these industries for the innovative technologies that it uses, which were developed with a focus on the operational environment in key European industries, for having a safe collaborative robotic system, for helping the improvement of the competitiveness of European manufacturing and for allowing a flexible production”, explains Germano Veiga, , researcher of INESC TEC's Centre for Robotics in Industry and Intelligent Systems.
The robots play an important role in the production industry, in which the competitiveness depends very much on their productivity, flexibility and agility in order to meet the market requirements, especially if they are prepared to collaborate with human robots in a shared working space.
“We are now facing a paradigm where robots and humans take advantage of each other's capacities, cognitives in the human case and the performance of repetitive tasks in the robot case, without the need for replacement”, concludes INESC TEC's senior researcher.
Representatives of several institutions will be in Porto in order to attend the demonstration of the Renault case, namely those involved in this project: ENSAM École Nacionale Superieure d’Arts et Metiers, Centre d'Innovation des Technologies sans Contact EuraRFID, AKEO PLUS, RENAULT SAS and Thales Alenia Space – all of them are French -, University of Coimbra – Portugal -, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia – from Italy -, Fraunhofer-IFF from Germany, AIMEN - Asociación De Investigación Metalúrgica Del Noroeste and Technaid SL - both from Spain.
The video of ColRobot can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jLxO24gAJs&feature=youtu.be
This project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and development programme under the number 688807.
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For more information:
Joana Coelho
Communication Service
INESC TEC
FEUP’s Campus
Rua Dr Roberto Frias
4200-465 Porto
Portugal
T +351 22 209 4297
M +351 919 119 271