Due to Covid-19 the 2nd review meeting will be a one-day online event on the 27th of May, 2021.
Due to Covid-19 there has been a change in the consortium’s plans and the 6th plenary meeting will be a two-day online event between 30th June and 1st July.
Having previously visited COMAU SPA, the HR-Recycler partners were scheduled to travel to Valencia for their 6th plenary meeting and visit the premises of partner ROBOTNIK but due to the Covid-19 situation it was decided that the plenary meeting should take place online using Zoom video conference software.
The 11 partners of HR-Recycler will be visiting Turin, Italy for their 6th plenary meeting.
Having previously visited COMAU SPA, the HR-Recycler partners will now travel to Valencia for their 6th plenary meeting and visit the premises of partner ROBOTNIK.
The 11 partners of HR-Recycler will be travelling to Turin to present the ongoing progress of the project and future plans as part of their 2nd review meeting.
Early October of 2020, the WP leaders will meet in Turin for the second project review meeting. At the meeting, the Project Officer and 2 Project technical advisors will be present to evaluate the project development.
The 11 partners of HR-Recycler traveled to Brussels to present the ongoing progress of the project and future plans.
On the 30th of January 2020, the WP leaders met in Brussels for the first project review meeting. At the meeting, the Project Officer and 2 Project technical advisors were overall extremely satisfied by the project’s progress and provided valuable feedback to the project partners.
The 11 partners of HR-Recycler visited Turin, Italy for their 5th plenary meeting.
Having previously visited BIANATT SA, the HR-Recycler partners now traveled to Turin for their 5th plenary meeting and visit the premises of partner COMAU SPA.
A scientific paper about the general concept and the system architecture of the HR-Recycler project presented at the 2019 IEEE Smart World Congress that held at Leicester of UK on 19-23 of August 2019.
The paper entitled “A hybrid human-robot collaborative environment for recycling electrical and electronic equipment” presented by Dr. Ioannis Kostavelis and aroused the interest of the audience, initiating a constructive discussion regarding the role of robots in challenging industrial environments for the recycling tasks of WEEE.
HR-Recycler participated in a Workshop on the Cluster of “Industrial Human Robot Collaboration” projects that took place in Brussels, on 1st July 2019.
The workshop was organized by the European Commission (Bram Vanderborght, Andrea Ceglia, Laszlo Hetey and Jurgen Tiedje) and its aim was to prepare a publicly available policy report illustrating the potential benefits of funding research and innovation on robotics, identify emerging technology trends, environmental, economic and societal impacts. This report will be presented at European Research and Innovation Days in Brussels, from 24 to 26 September 2019 (https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/events/upcoming-events/european-research-and-innovation-days_en).
The following projects of the Cluster of “Industrial Human Robot Collaboration” participated:
- HR-Recycler
- Rossini (http://www.rossini-project.com)
- Coroma (https://www.coroma-project.eu/)
- COLLABORATE (collaborate-project.eu)
- SHERLOCK (http://www.sherlock-project.eu/)
- THOMAS (http://www.thomas-project.eu)
- SHAREWORK (https://sharework-project.eu/)
The workshop started with a short presentation of each project of the Cluster, presented by each project’s representative. Each presentation included the motivation, main goal and objectives of the project, the consortium and a brief description of the proposed technical solution and the related Use Cases.
The next part of the workshop included the Technological Analysis. More specifically, the current Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) achieved by the current research projects in this area were analysed and the challenges for high TRL levels were discussed. Regarding integration/implementation issues the following aspects were discussed: Standards (if sufficiently developed and translated in good practices), Certification (how it is done, if it can be done for a wide range of applications, etc.), Interoperability (how it is implemented), Benchmarking and Reproducibility of scientific research.
Another interesting point of discussion was the industrial and economic impact, where several issues were analysed. New business models arise when moving from traditional industrial robots to collaborative robots, while the economic viability of investing in robots that collaborate with human workers has been extensively studied. Other issues include the targeted increase of productivity (e.g. time, quality, resources, working conditions), barriers to valorization, the potential challenges for startups, targeting liability and intellectual property. Finally, the role of Digital Innovation Hubs was discussed.
Last but not least, the Social Impact by moving from traditional industrial robots to collaborative robots was discussed. It is of high importance to ensure that the use of Human-Robot Collaboration in industry is able to improve working conditions and increase the amount of jobs. Ethical aspects were also discussed (ethics screening, job loss, handling of privacy, position of women).
The importance of EU collaborative projects was stressed, as well as potential improvements on how subsequent public or private investments can put in place the technologies that result from these projects.
The importance of EU collaborative projects was stressed, as well as potential improvements on how subsequent public or private investments can put in place the technologies that result from these projects.
What is also important is to place the initiative more at end-user companies that have specific needs, instead of EU research centers.
The 11 partners of HR-Recycler met in Athens, Greece for their 4th plenary meeting.
Having previously visited Interecycling – Sociedade de Reciclagem, S.A., the HR-Recycler partner traveled to Athens for their 4th plenary meeting and visit another end user taking part in the project, namely BIANATT SA.
The 11 partners of HR-Recycler met in Barcelona, Spain for their 3rd plenary meeting.
The HR-Recycler partners were hosted in Barcelona, Spain by partner Institute for BioEngineering of Catalonia (IBEC) for their 3rd plenary meeting. Among the many decisions that had to be made, the most important of them related to the following topics:
- The need to clarify user needs associated with the whole procedure and how this important input will be elucidated.
- What will be the final spatial configuration of all the hardware, i.e. robotic equipment, cameras, etc. participating in the project both on factory level and on cell level perception.
- Finalizing a capturing framework which will provide all the necessary details regarding the video capturing process taking place at each end user’s premises allowing technical partners CERTH and SDK to train their Deep Learning modules.
