The ROSSINI project aims to develop a disruptive, inherently safe hardware-software solution for the design and deployment of human-robot collaboration (HRC) applications in manufacturing. By combining innovative sensing, actuation and control technologies (developed by world market leaders in their field), and integrating them in an open development environment, the ROSSINI solution will deliver a set of tools which will enable the spread of HRC applications where robots and human operators will become members of the same team, increasing job quality, production flexibility and productivity.
Thanks to enhanced robot sensing capabilities, the deployment of artificial intelligence to optimise productivity and safety, and natively collaborative manipulation technologies, ROSSINI wants to deliver high performance HRC workcells, combining the safety of traditional cobots with the working speed and payloads of industrial robots.
To reach the above vision, ROSSINI proposes the implementation of a Safety-Aware Architecture concept where a safety layer connects a flexible execution control layer to the HRC interaction block, guaranteeing high performance and safety at the same time. In this perspective, the ROSSINI solution has been defined as a Modular KIT of components aiming at implementing the Sonsidering the following development blocks:
- SENSING: a high performance Smart and Safe Sensor System for human and robot detection & tracking, capable of quickening sensors response time by 70%
- PERCEPTION, COGNITION and CONTROL: namely, an integrated safety aware control architecture for robot dynamic reconfiguration, capable of reducing robot task execution time by 45%
- ACTUATION: an innovative, collaborative by birth robot manipulator, to be marketed through the ROSSINI platform, capable of increasing the working speed when collaborating with humans by 45%
- HUMAN FACTORS: human factors analysis for mutual predictability of robot and human intentions, capable of increasing job quality index by 15%
- HR CELL INTEGRATION: advanced tools to design a HR cell and ease the needed risk assessment procedures based on new interpretation of collision values, capable of reducing (combined with other results) by 30% the time and cost of reconfiguration, and increasing the allowed robot working speed by 20%
Overall, the ROSSINI modular KIT is made of 16 different components that can be grouped according to four different sets:
- CORE components, that are necessary to build a ROSSINI Platform being fundamental to implement the Safety-Aware Architecture concept
- EXTRA components, that can be useful up to the given application scenarios
- AGGREGATED components, that consist of two or more components to be considered as a whole
In addition to the above, also EXTERNAL components can be identified and integrated to expand a ROSSINI Platform. Here the ROSSINI Platform is defined as an aggregation of all the CORE components developed to implement the Safety-Aware Architecture concept.
Similarly, a ROSSINI Platform Implementation is a suitably configured ROSSINI Platform interconnected with other components (EXTRA/EXT INT) for a given application (use case).
Within the ROSSINI poject, three reearch demonstrators (white goods, electronic equipment, and food packaging) turned out in three corresponding (and very different) ROSSINI Platform Implementations .
| File | Type | |
|---|---|---|
| ROSSINI_poster.pdf | ||
| Rossini_Press Release_9 December 2019.pdf | ||
| Rossini_Press Release_April 2020.pdf | ||
| Rossini_PressRelease_15 April 2019.pdf | ||
| Rossini_PressRelease_3 September 2019.pdf | ||
| Rossini_PressRelease_January2022.pdf | ||
| Rossini_PressRelease_March 2021.pdf | ||
| Rossini_PressRelease_November2021.pdf | ||
| Rossini_PressRelease_September 2020.pdf |
| Web resources: |
https://www.rossini-project.com
- The ROSSINI project's official website
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/818087 - The ROSSINI project's CORDIS page |
| Start date: | 01-10-2018 |
| End date: | 31-03-2022 |
| Total budget - Public funding: | 7 978 176,00 Euro - 7 978 176,00 Euro |
| Twitter: | @Rossini_project |
Original description
The ROSSINI project aims to develop a disruptive, inherently safe hardware-software platform for the design and deployment of human-robot collaboration (HRC) applications in manufacturing. By combining innovative sensing, actuation and control technologies (developed by world market leaders in their field), and integrating them in an open development environment, the ROSSINI platform will deliver a set of tools which will enable the spread of HRC applications where robots and human operators will become members of the same team, increasing job quality, production flexibility and productivity.Thanks to enhanced robot sensing capabilities, the deployment of artificial intelligence to optimise productivity and safety, and natively collaborative manipulation technologies, ROSSINI will deliver high performance HRC workcells, combining the safety of traditional cobots with the working speed and payloads of industrial robots.
The ROSSINI research lines will this be:
SENSING: A high performance Smart and Safe Sensor System for human and robot detection & tracking, capable of quickening sensors response time by 70%
CONTROL: A safety aware control architecture for robot dynamic reconfiguration, capable of reducing robot task execution time by 45%
ACTUATION: An innovative, collaborative by birth robot manipulator, to be marketed through the ROSSINI platform, capable of increasing the working speed when collaborating with humans by 45%
HUMAN FACTORS: Human factors analysis for mutual predictability of robot and human intentions, capable of increasing job quality index by 15%
RISK ASSESSMENT: A risk assessment procedure based on new interpretation of collision values, capable of reducing (combined with other results) by 30% the time and cost of reconfiguration, and increasing the allowed robot working speed by 20%
The research lines will be combined into 3 demonstrators (white goods, electronic equipment, and food packaging).
Status
SIGNEDCall topic
DT-FOF-02-2018Update Date
27-10-2022Factories of the Future Partnership - Made in Europe Partnership
ROSSINI develops and demonstrates technologies enabling a significant advancement in HRC. They are:
- ROSSINI Smart and Safe Sensing System
- Safety Aware Control Architecture
- Collaborative by Birth Robotic Arm
- Human-robot mutual understanding framework
- Integration and Validation Layer
These technologies will be then integrated into the ROSSINI Platform architecture.
Expected achievements: 15% increase in OECD Job Quality Index through work environment and safety improvement; 20% reduction in production reconfiguration time and cost; reduction of heavy works impacts and costs: increase in the overall job satisfaction and job attractiveness; increased value-chain integration and stakeholder satisfaction
HRC applications pose several challenges to the manufacturing industry which sees an increased need for automation and scalability, notably in SMEs. Moreover, at the moment, HRC applications imply also huge investments in terms of effort, time and intellectual capital to integrate robots and sensors into the manufacturing workflow which can’t be afforded by most of the European SMEs, notably if the production combines low volume with high mix. Trough ROSSINI project, implementation of real and cost effective HRC contributes to redesign workplaces combining automation and lean manufacturing concept, with a drastic reduction of conversion and reconfiguration costs.
The development of the Rossini Modular KIT allowed to bring significant advance in terms of tecnology and awareness on collaborative robotics for all Europe. In particular, the set of efficient and modular tools developed within Rossini enable and ease different specific activities: from the hazarda assessment evaluation untill the multiple detection of humans on a monitored area where robots are working. Nevertheless, important activities still need quite a few effort in terms of knowledge, development and collaboration: from the necessity to refine (or define new well-establised interfaces) untill the identification of solutions able to bring the human-robot iteraction even closer (and more trustworthy), also in terms of standadization (that still present several gaps on this topic).
In particular, the following topic have been identified as important issues to tackle in future activities and research:
- Cross-domain approach for both design and validation 8in terms of safety and beyond)
- Considering the need to widespread HRC technologies throughout very different kind of people
- Identification of the most suitable data to collect and monitor
- Inclusion of a proper ergonomics perspective to interpret data
- Automatization of the risk assessment in the design phase
- Maintaining coherence in development with the already published standards
ROSSINI helps European factories to attract skilled workforce in factories because of the attention paid to job quality and employee satisfaction
Project clusters are groups of projects that cooperate by organising events, generating joint papers, etc...
Concerning standardization, the ROSSINI project defined a roadmap of activities based on three pillars:
- Training and knowledge sharing among standards and best practice on HRC application (both internally and externally the ROSSINI consortium)
- Participation in working groups to bring the knowledge and experience acquired during the development of the ROSSINI project
- Active contribution to standardization.
The contribution of the ROSSINI project have been effective to provide useful insights to the regulatory scenario, as the project tackles the development of innovative robotic solutions characterized by built-in safety features, and a safety aware control architecture.
In particular, the activities planned and realized within the ROSSINI Standardization Roadmap contributed fruitfully as input for standardization in terms of identification of the main issues and topic to be address into standards, contribution to offical standardizaiton documents and contribution to ISO/PAS documents.
The ROSSINI project members collaborated with the COVR project to realize an official document (CWA) on safety in collaborative robotic that may serve as reference for standard development
Inclusion of the task T7.1 outcome (i.e., a new methodology that allows for assessing transient human-robot contacts) in ISO/PAS for safety standardization
ROSSINI provides several advances beyond the state of the art, developing a Safety Aware Control Architecture for robot cognitive perception and optimal task planning and execution.
In order to enable actual perception, ROSSINI leverages on a data processing technique for real-time image recognition, to obtain a semantic scene map that adapts to dynamic working conditions.
ROSSINI adopts also algorithms for motion prediction of humans and moving entities, and embeds their stochastic information in the dynamic semantic scene map. This allows the robot to further refine its planning in order to maximize performance while preserving safety.
In this way, ROSSINI introduces a novel perception and control architecture blending safety and performance oriented planning/control that wants to reach the goal of optimising the trade-off between human operator safety and manufacturing productivity.
The ROSSINI platform implementation of a Safety Aware Control Architecture makes it possible for robots to optimally schedule the tasks reacting to a changing environment. in fact, each action to be execute is sent to a dynamic planner that dynamically optimizes its execution in terms of trajectory to follow and/or interactive behaviour to reproduce while considering the variable safety conditions in the working area.
Cobots and in general HRC solutions, which can be used for multiple functions due to their flexibility in deployment, offer higher returns on investment and faster payback, compared to legacy industrial robots. Moreover, cobots’ safety features and ease of use make integration and implementation less costly than the traditional industrial robots. In high-cost countries, having skilled human workers engaged in suitable configured manufacturing, assembly, finishing and inspection operations side by side with cobots is one of the most cost- effective ways to leverage the unique value-adding capabilities of a skilled human workforce
ROSSINI develops a Design Level that allows users to follow and evaluate process designs on multiple dimensions, where job quality and related metrics are the primary outcomes together with productivity, product quality and cost
The joint action of the dynamic scheduler and of the dynamic planner can lead to a reduction of up to 45% of the overall task execution time
The workcells employing the ROSSINI human-robot mutual understanding framework can increase production flexibility by 5%.
HRC solutions make it possible to integrate production machinery, warehousing systems and production facilities into single human-centred cyber-physical systems. As such, the traditional frontier between the production and logistical tasks of manufacturing can be expected to become increasingly interconnected. Lastly, an increased uptake of HRC leads to a change in the robotics value chain itself. Suppliers, integrators and users are bound to collaborate more intensively which is already leading to new business models such as rental/leasing agreements, pay-on-production, predictive maintenance, etc.
ROSSINI delivers high performance HRC workcells, combining the safety of traditional cobots with the working speed and payloads of industrial robots, capable of optimising task execution. This triggers manufacturers’ investment in HRC technology, increasing European factories productivity and thus competitiveness versus low-cost manufacturers.
ROSSINI is expected to unleash new market opportunities for the consortium industrial partners, resulting in a total yearly turnover of worth 125M€ by 2027
ROSSINI ambition is to develop a framework for Human-Robot Mutual Understanding in collaborative operations which will incorporate a human-centred process design level to address and account for human factors like job quality, user experience, trust, feeling of safety, and liability, in the early design stages.
The Rossini Smart and Safe Sensing System (RS4) combine information from several different customised sensing technologies (Vision, Laser Scanning, Radar, Mat, etc.) in order track not only the position but also the speed of each operator and object in the scene, thus ensuring operators’ safety. Moreover, the use of cobots reduces the amount of working hours spent in physical working thus shifting the workforce away from more physically laborious tasks, towards those of assembly, programming etc. In this way, jobs could become more interesting given their need for higher levels of creativity, problem solving and decision making, definitively resulting in an improved job satisfaction.
Sensor data fusion from multiple and heterogeneous is at the core of the development of the RS4 Controller (CORE component of the Rossini Modular KIT)
Human-machine interface is key to evaluate Job Quality in considering Human Factors analysis and therefore is very relevant in the HR cell design phase also
Based on ROS, the Rossini Modular KIT aims to be fully scalable and widely adopted
The ROSSINI modular KIT offers advance components for the different layers of a robotic application (sensing, perception, cognition, control, actuation and integration)
The RS4 Controller gather and fuse data from different sensor sources. Within ROSSINI the following sensor sources have been developed as EXTRA components able to be connected with the RS4 controller: 3D Vision cameras, Lidar arrays, Radars and Skins.
The ROSSINI Controller (CORE component of the ROSSINI Modular KIT) integrates a Semantic Scena Map, a Flexible layer (Scheduler) and an Execution layer (Motion Planner) to guarantee optimal efficiency of the robot (also considering Job Quality factors)
Within the ROSSINI project an advanced collaborative robot have been developed, equipped with advanced and novel interfaces, and able to perfom very low breaking time.
All the three ROSSINI demonstrators (white goods, electronic equipment, and food packaging) proof the feasibility and the advantages of ROSSINI Platform Implementations in relevant (diffenet and complex) industrial environments
Human-Robot Collaboration is key in the development of the Rossini solution: all the use cases look at this scenario, allowing the human operation working in the same cell with the robot, on the same machine and even on the same work-piece.
The Virtual Design Tool (CORE component of the ROSSINI solution) wants to ease the design process of a HR cell implementation (e.g., helping with the sensor placing or the hazard assessment evaluation)
Job quality evaluation focused on HRC developments aim in improving well-being of workers (acceptance, trust, physical health) in contexts where robots may become actual co-workers.
Trust and acceptance of the workforce are the enabling factor for an actual adoption of HRC solution.
Human-Robot Collaboration is key in the development of the Rossini solution: all the use cases look at this scenario, allowing the human operation working in the same cell with the robot, on the same machine and even on the same work-piece.
The ROSSINI vision is the on of guarantee above all safety and health of the operators.
The ROSSINI modular KIT solution is based on ROS to spur scalability and wide adoption
The Virtual Design Tool facilitates the integration of the ROSSINI components at the platform level.
The ROSSINI Controller (Semantic Scena Map, Flexible and Execution layers) is designed to improved efficiency in the production line/robotic cell (adapting to the possible changing in the environment and including job quality factors)
The RS4 System (RS4 Controller and sensors) is designed to improve safety also for standard robots
The ROSSINI Modular KIT is a set of components that can be integrated to implement robotic workcells, capable of increasing job quality and reducing reconfiguration time.
Real-time sensing and communication features are key to guarantee safety
The overal modular approach of the ROSSINI solution and the implementation of ROS nodes for the various components of the ROSSINI Modular KIT is intended for internal (CORE, EXTRA and AGGREGATED components) and external (EXTERNAL components) scalability of the whole system.
The ROSSINI project gathered IP policies under the Data Management Plan
The ROSSINI Modular KIT is conceived to contribute in the HRC application development on several levels. For this reasons, partnerships with third parties (i.e, external integration and solution's adoption by system integrators) are key for the future development and dissemination of the solution
The ROSSINI project runs its development in accordance with EU rules and regulations, as GDPR
The ROSSINI project gathered IP policies under the Data Management Plan
The RS4 System (RS4 Controller and sensors) is designed to improve safety also for standard robots
The ROSSINI Controller (Semantic Scena Map, Flexible and Execution layers) is designed to improved efficiency in the production line/robotic cell (adapting to the possible changing in the environment and including job quality factors)
The ROSSINI Modular KIT is a set of components that can be integrated to implement robotic workcells, capable of increasing job quality and reducing reconfiguration time.
The ROSSINI project foresees 3 use-cases related to Domestic Appliances Assembly (WHIRLPOOL), Electronic Components Production (SCHINDLER) and Food Products Packaging (IMA). The 1st use case aims at implementing real and efficient HRC which will allow to enhance human health and satisfaction in workplaces combining automation and the lean manufacturing concept thus reducing costs and avoiding dangerous operations for workers (requirement: improving safety in HRC and maintain the efficiency of the production line). The 2nd use case wants to redesign the actual production line where individually separate but related items are grouped (the kitting step), packaged (the assembly step) and supplied together as one unit (requirement: strict collaboration between human operators and robot). The 3rd use case will leverage on a mobile robotic solution and an advanced smart sensing system to improve its current robotic solution for assisting operator in machine monitoring and maintenance (requirement: improve system performance in terms of speeds, handled objects and capabilities, whilst maintain operator safety)
13/03/22 - 08:22
The Rossini project: platform’s integrations in use cases - OPEN WEBINAR
The final Open Webinar of the ROSSINI project will focus on the results achieved by the implementation of innovative solutions within the Collaborative Robotics field, in the 3 industrial Use Cases (IMA, WHIRLPOOL, SCHINDLER).
The webinar will be online, on March 23rd at 3 pm.
Please click on the link below and register!
https://www.crit-research.it/it/eventi/rossini-platform-integration-in-use-cases/
24/08/20 - 09:09
Rossini’s recent advances in the cognitive layer for collaborative robot control - Press release
Please, find at this link the most recent updates on the Rossini project: https://www.rossini-project.com/news-and-events
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| DATASENSING SRL (Coördinator)
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| DATALOGIC SRL (DATALOGIC) (Coördinator)
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| CORE INNOVATION
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| CRIT Research Srl
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| DATALOGIC IP TECH SRL (DLIPTECH)
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| FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FOERDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG E.V.
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| I.M.A. INDUSTRIA MACCHINE AUTOMATICHE SPA (IMA)
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| INDUSTRIELE MECHANISATIE OF AUTOMATISATIE NV (MACHINEBOUW)
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| IRIS
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| PILZ GMBH & CO. KG (PILZ)
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| SCHINDLER SUPPLY CHAIN EUROPE AG (SCHINDLER)
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| TNO - Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek
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| University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
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| University of applied sciences and arts of southern switzerland (SUPSI)
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| WHIRLPOOL EMEA SPA
The ROSSINI project foresees 3 use-cases related to Domestic Appliances Assembly (WHIRLPOOL), Electronic Components Production (SCHINDLER) and Food Products Packaging (IMA). The 1st use case aims at implementing real and efficient HRC which will allow to enhance human health and satisfaction in workplaces combining automation and the lean manufacturing concept thus reducing costs and avoiding dangerous operations for workers (requirement: improving safety in HRC and maintain the efficiency of the production line). The 2nd use case wants to redesign the actual production line where individually separate but related items are grouped (the kitting step), packaged (the assembly step) and supplied together as one unit (requirement: strict collaboration between human operators and robot). The 3rd use case will leverage on a mobile robotic solution and an advanced smart sensing system to improve its current robotic solution for assisting operator in machine monitoring and maintenance (requirement: improve system performance in terms of speeds, handled objects and capabilities, whilst maintain operator safety)