Digital technologies for Industry 4.0

The goal of this project is to establish a multi-disciplinary platform for Industry 4.0 activities in TECH. Such platform can be used for research, teaching, as well as for public demonstrations. It is meant to strengthen synergies within AAU and with other relevant departments in Danish universities in the Industry 4.0 domain, as well as to attract national industries for joint research and innovation projects.
Two main general use cases with high potential in terms of cross-disciplinary research/innovation have been identified for the project:
- Swarm robotics for smart production. The main idea is to overcome the rigid sequential paradigm of a traditional production line, by enabling a group of coordinated robots to move items at different working stations depending on flexible production needs. Robots are wireless controlled, and the scheduling of their operations can be centralized or distributed.
- IoT for optimization of production processes. A large number of sensors are placed in the factory to monitor machine conditions (e.g., vibration and ultrasonic energy in rotating machines). Such information can be centrally gathered via wireless. The central server can leverage from the necessary analytics and machine learning tools for optimization of production processes (e.g., predictive maintenance).