Innovative robotic applications for highly reconfigurable production lines - versatile
The recent trends of mass customization of products and lean approaches impacts production by a drastic reduction of
production lot sizes. However, traditional automation and robotics fail to be competitive in such a context since all individual
product variant would require a complete automation project. In addition, keeping up with the introduction of robots outside of
the traditional sectors require to automate much more complex manual tasks, where again traditional robotics automation
fails to provide a good ratio of cost vs robustness, mainly due to the rigidity of existing production equipment in terms of
programming and tools

The overall objective of the project is to provide a bridge for transferring, demonstrating and validating the latest R&D results
in robotics towards different industrial environments proving their applicability and effectiveness.
More specifically, VERSATILE will apply dual arm robots in executing complex tasks that are traditionally assigned to
humans due to their manipulation requirements. By providing the tools to quickly setup, program and operate innovative
robotic systems the end user will have robotic cells flexible enough to automatically adapt to the high number of products
variants.

In this context the project will focus on advancing the TRL level of the latest developments in the areas of:
- Perception for Operation in semi-structured environment
- Easy Programming framework to improve the re-configurability/ programmability of the robotic systems
- Mobile dual-arm robotics manipulation capabilities
- Open frameworks for the ‘Plug and Produce’ based coordination of these resources

This will be investigated in three industry driven use cases including both static and mobile dual arm robots. The project will
focus on three main applications:
- Automotive: assembly of vehicle dashboards at PSA
- Aerospace: assembly of aircraft wing parts at AIRBUS
- Consumer goods: handling and packaging of shaver handles at BIC