From the 14th to the 16th of March, the European Robotics Forum has gathered the pinnacle of robotics research and industry in Odense, Denmark. The #AIPRISM25 team participated in two workshops and a digital booth within the forum in this Danish city, which has one of the world’s leading robotic clusters.
More than 400 visitors learned how AI-PRISM is developing a human-centred AI-based solutions ecosystem targeted to manufacturing scenarios. The forum was at the edge of what is happening in European robotics. Therefore, it was a timely opportunity to present the project’s objectives, innovations and use cases before enthusiasts’ researchers, governments, and end-users.
Human-Robot Collaboration and AI in challenging industrial applications
AI-PRISM inaugurated its participation at the forum with a workshop dedicated to human-robot collaboration and AI in challenging industrial applications. Researcher Francisco Blanes, from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), introduced the project to the 130 attendees.
In addition to presenting AI-PRISM, the researcher engaged in discussions with the other 6 European projects – ZerOp, Merging, Ferox, Respect, Felice, and Agile Hand. All speakers addressed questions about implementing human-robot collaborations in real-world industrial applications where tasks are difficult to automate, workers’ and operators’ interactions in hybrid collaborative systems, AI enabling robots to be aware of workers’ tasks, and AI endowing logistics fleet management systems with resilience capabilities.
Francisco Blanes underlined: “It is very important to update safety regulations. This will make it possible to remove legal barriers and to bring innovative solutions from research into the factories.”
10th Hybrid production systems workshop
On the second day, AI-PRISM researcher and scientists Sharath Chandra Akkaladevi, from partner Profactor (PRO) spoke at the sister project’s Converging EU and the 10th Hybrid Production Systems Cluster workshop. He presented the project in session 3, designated to AI for Human-Robot Collaboration.
Representatives of the European Commission opened the workshop, providing an overview of the Horizon Europe program and its focus on robotics. Participants of the presented projects, such as AI-PRISM, had the opportunity to explore collaboration possibilities with other members of the robotics community and the 30 attendees.
Robotics and AI for sustainable recycling and remanufacturing
On the first day of the forum, partner Profactor also organized another workshop to discuss how robotics & AI can revolutionize waste management and increase sustainable production, where AI-PRISM was acknowledged. With 120 participants, the workshop learned from keynote speakers’ discussions on topics of common interest, success stories, use cases, etc. A position paper on the workshop results will be shared with the respective topic group/s (TG sustainability).
Robotnik booth at the forum
During the high-level forum, our partner Robotnik participated as Silver Sponsor to contribute to and promote this international meeting. As a result, they had the opportunity to share with visitors and researchers the main news in collaborative mobile robotics.
In Robotnik’s booth, in parallel to their latest mobile robots developed, they provided information about AI-PRISM, one of their R&D projects in robotics and other success stories in industrial applications. Over 150 visitors were interested in these innovations.
The visitors showed special interest in the demo performed by the RB-KAIROS+ manipulator robot: a Pick & Place developed to be executed in collaborative manufacturing environments, sharing workspace with humans. This is one of the main goals of AI-PRISM, the development of a safe and robust ecosystem that automates manufacturing tasks in a collaborative way with the operators. It was definitely a great ERF2023 for all of us in the robotics sector!
