The AI-PRISM consortium holds the necessary expertise to strategically improve the EU Smart manufacturing value chain in four domains: collaborative environment, robot perception and recognition, robot programming and human factors. We are working to achieve the right trade-off between complementary and overlapping among the industrial partners.
In the industrial category, we count on use case partners with experience in actual market product development and industrial activities such as Andreu World. Together with the other four use cases, we generate a broad range of user-centred requirements, deployment blueprints, integration plans, testing scenarios, and performance monitoring to assess preliminary designs and feed the next iterations.
The Andreu World pilot site covers the sector of furniture manufacturing in Valencia, Spain. The company designs, develops and manufactures contemporary furniture with high-added value for the global market. Funded in 1955, Andreu World is a leading company in export business and sustainable design based on a solid industrial culture. In general, the company is well known as a successful case in industrializing craftsmanship in the furniture industry. At AI-PRISM, they will introduce collaborative robots that can support humans in the painting process.
Today, the Andreu World team is sharing a video about their company, showing how they truly value the experience of the people who choose their furniture, so their collections can be found in more than 124 countries. Moreover, they have undertaken to lead sustainability in the sector and by 2023, all their designs will be in a circular economy.
Andreu World first factory, called Andreu, was in Andreu Est Alacuás, founder Francisco Andreu’s hometown. Nowadays, the new factory Andreu Est Riba-roja includes the production processes of raw materials and finished product logistics, upholstery, woodwork, and packaging. In total, the factory has 50.000 m2 and 200 technicians. Some of these technicians are performing manually the painting and sanding processes that AI-PRISM will automate and require a high degree of personalization and accuracy of the applied force depending on the materials and pieces of furniture.
With AI-PRISM, they count on the support of research partner the Polytechnical University of Valencia (UPV) and tech providers UPV and the Institute of Technology and Informatics (ITI) to automate these processes. More concretely, they will develop a human-robot collaborative environment where humans will teach robots to perform tasks. The expected endpoint is to have a human with skills in painting and sanding in charge of training and supervising the entire process and robots handling all the tasks.
Ultimately, the use case aims to solve the problems of the cobot training process, the safety of humans in the collaborative environment and the quality of the sanding and painting processes. In that way, the robots will eventually make these jobs less repetitive for humans, who can then focus on tasks that provide a higher added value for the company, improving work quality, ergonomics, productivity and efficiency, as well as reducing material scrap.
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