Acronimo: DYNAMICA
Titolo: DYNamic Assessment and Mitigation of the Impact of Collaborative Applications
Coordinatore: prof. Giulio Rosati - Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale-Università degli Studi di PADOVA
Partner-Unità di ricerca: Università Politecnica delle MARCHE, Università degli Studi di PAVIA
Bando: PRIN 2022 - Decreto Direttoriale n. 104 del 02-02-2022
Durata: 28/09/2023 – 27/09/2025 (24 mesi)
Budget totale progetto: € 219.936,00

Abstract del progetto

Collaborative robots (cobots) are expected to play an important role in strengthening the capacity to manufacture goods in a sustainable and competitive way, empowering of end-users and workers, enhancing safety and preventing health risk in the workplace, with a new human-centered paradigm.

Cobots can share the same workplace with humans, physically interacting with them in the execution of shared tasks, in which the expertise of operators and repeatability of robots can be merged. The implementation of collaborative applications is still tough for non-skilled operators, and several fundamental issues remain to be addressed. The new generation of cobots for industry should be endowed with improved tools for rapid deployment and reconfiguration. Such ambitious goals become even more challenging in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), where the adoption of sophisticated technologies is often prevented by the need of specialized workers. Such a lack of innovation in the production lines increases the risk for a SME of failing to cope with market change and consumer individualization.

DYNAMICA project will develop and deliver tools that will allow an enterprise to rapidly install a new cobot, run it safely in the factory environment, and easily re-configure it to accomplish changed tasks or environmental conditions, overcoming the current barriers that limit the full usability of collaborative robots.

The DYNAMICA project will address the scientific and technological improvement of three key research topics: 1) evaluation of the impact of cobots on production and human energy expenditure; 2) easier teaching and programming capability of new tasks; 3) safety assessment and safer trajectory planning. DYNAMICA will at first study the fundamental issues in these topics and define novel methods and algorithms to address the issues. Then a full set of tools to enhance the design and operation of collaborative workcells will be developed: Impact evaluation tool, to account for the actual energy expenditure and throughput of a collaborative workcell in real industrial scenarios, considering both technological and human factors; Teaching module, to make easier robot programming by a dedicated HMI; Safety evaluation tool, to evaluate the impact of cobot operational parameters on safety in real applications and to safely operate with robots thanks to novel real-time algorithms.

The evaluation of project outcomes will be carried out by means of prototype workcells, which will integrate and exploit the tools in real case studies. The technology demonstrators will undergo experimental testing to show the feasibility and the effectiveness of the methods and tools delivered in real scenarios.

DYNAMICA will build new knowledge in a cutting-edge technological field and will enforce the sharing of the expertise of the 3 RUs, in accordance with the national goal of enforcing the implementation of Industry 4.0 paradigm and the digital transition of Italian SMEs.