AgileHand Project
EU manufacturers in the sector of Conveyor System and especially robot for automated material handling play an important role in growing global world market.
Many objects handled by those robots like food, clothes, bottles, or plastic items, are soft or deformable and they are not yet efficient and effective in handling these objects.
In this context, AGILEHAND aims at developing advanced technologies for grading, handling and packaging autonomously soft and deformable products, as a strategic instrument to improve flexibility, agility and reconfigurability of production and logistic systems of the European manufacturing companies.
Objectives
AGILEHAND project aims at developing innovative solutions for three key aspects of a workpiece handling system:
The Grading aspect, i.e. knowledge of the workpiece’s characteristics and condition. The main gains will be a cost effective, accurate and fast solution to finely grade the quality of delicate and perishable products.
The Handling aspect of soft and deformable products during the Sorting, Handling and Packaging stages. The project addresses the problems of robotic manipulation in a more human-oriented environment, where objects are diverse, deformable, and delicate.
Aspects of Agility, Flexibility and Reconfigurability in production lines. To build a set of AI based solutions for Agile Production Line Reconfiguration with :
- Monitoring
- Adaptative control
- synchronisation of production and logistics flows in a factory
This will guarantees high performance in customer response time, and an efficient use of resources.
Use cases
The AGILEHAND Solutions will be demonstrated in 4 industrial pilots that differ in characteristics of the surface, deformability, and consistency of the products to be handle.
- One focused on sorting and packaging of a wide variety of products of different shapes and consistency: Vegetables,
- One focused on grading and handling of slightly deformable but very brittle products: “berry” Fruits,
- One focused on innovative handling systems for deformable, greasy and slippery products: Fishes,
- the fourth pilot on grading, batching and packaging of soft, deformable and tacky products: Meats.