ROSSINI mapped on Significant innovations and lessons learned, training aspects

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