Sustainable and reliable robotics for part handling in manufacturing automation

Part handling during the assembly stages in the automotive industry is the only task with automation levels below 30% due to the variability of the production and to the diversity of suppliers and parts. The full automation of such task will not only have a huge impact in the automotive industry but will also act as a cornerstone in the development of advanced mobile robotic manipulators capable of dealing with unstructured environments, thus opening new possibilities in general for manufacturing SME's. The STAMINA project will use a holistic approach by partnering with experts in each necessary key fields, thus building on previous R&D to develop an autonomous and mobile industrial robot with different sensory, planning and physical capabilities that can be part of a fleet of robots and which can solve three logistic and handling tasks: De-palletizing, Bin-Picking and Kitting. The robot and orchestration systems will be developed in a lean manner using an iterative series of development and validation testes that will not only assess the performance and usability of the system but also allow goal-driven research. STAMINA will give special attention to the system integration promoting and assessing the development of a sustainable and scalable robotic system to ensure a clear path for the future exploitation of the developed technologies. In addition to the technological outcome, STAMINA will allow to give an impression on how a sharing of work and workspace between humans and robots could look in the future.