The adoption of robots in lower volume, diverse environment is heavily constrained by the high integration and deployment complexity that overshadows the performance benefits of this technology. If robots are to become well accepted across the whole spectra of production industries, real evidence that they can operate in an open, modular and scalable way is needed. ODIN aspires to fill this gap by bringing technology from the latest ground breaking research in the fields of a) collaborating robots and human robot collaborative workplaces b) autonomous robotics and AI based task planning c) mobile robots and reconfigurable tooling, d) Digital Twins and Virtual Commissioning and e) Service Oriented Robotics Integration and Communication Architectures. To strengthen the EU production companies’ trust in utilizing advanced robotics, the vision of ODIN is: “to demonstrate that novel robot-based production systems are not only technically feasible, but also efficient and sustainable for immediate introduction at the shopfloor”. ODIN will achieve this vision through the implementation of Large Scale Pilots consisting of the following components: - Open Component (OC): A small footprint, small scale pilot instance allowing the development, integration and testing of cutting-edge technologies. - Digital Component (DC): A virtual instance of the pilot implementing an accurate Digital Twin representation that allows the commissioning, validation and control of the actual pilot - Industrial Component (IC): A full-scale instance of the pilot, integrating hardware (HW) and software (SW) modules from the Open and Digital components and operating under an actual production environment. - Networked Component (IC): An integration architecture with open interfaces allowing the communication of all robotics HW and control systems through safe and secure means. ODIN will demonstrate its result in 3 Large Scale Pilots in the automotive, white goods and aeronautic sectors.

The transition into the 4th industrial revolution promises to integrate IoT and cyber-physical systems into the industrial domain and to boost the productivity of industrial verticals thanks to a radical automation of all the phases of production. Communications are key to enable i4.0, but are subject to the stringent requirements of automated applications in terms of availability, reliability, low latency, integrity, scalability, safety and positioning accuracy. A wirelessly connected factory enables novel mobile robots, easy reconfiguration of assembly lines and migration of embedded control functions to the virtually infinite computational/cache resources and flexibility of edge clouds. From a managerial perspective, integrated billing and tracking capabilities of 5G facilitate novel models such as that can drive a business disruption. As a result, the i4.0 ecosystem is an opportunity for the wireless community and has become one of the key targets of 5G. From a technical side, the development of wireless i4.0 entails a paradigm shift from reactive and centralized networks towards massive, ultra-reliable and proactive networks that may operate in wide remote scenarios, with thousands of devices, uncertainty, high dynamics, rare events, unpredictable interference and harsh conditions. Merging 5G networks and i4.0 comes with its own difficulties, because these two domains have been disjoint so far. Here is the key opening identified by 5GSmartFact: the need of a surge of skilled researchers and engineers in the upcoming years to work at the crossroads of factory automation and 5G evolutions. Having this in mind, the objective of the research programme is to train young researches to be able to analyse, design, develop and assess the deployment of 5G networks that target the i4.0 requirements and exploit them to integrate current robot applications which might lead to a complete redesign of robot architectures and hence to a leap forward in the automation industry.

Manual and automated production lines must evolve to “produce more and diverse with less”, however they need to address shortcomings such as - high product variants requiring tool level dexterity and resource level reconfigurability - lack of cognitive perception systems to allow autonomous reasoning and operation - absence of adaptable control to accurately handle a variety of workpieces and materials, and - inefficiency of planning systems in addressing holistically all hierarchical production levels. SMARTHANDLE will research technologies to address these needs and support European industry, by implementing a) intelligent, reconfigurable agents to provide dexterity in a range of handling applications, b) AI based reasoning enablers to optimize the flexibility potential of these agents and c) Higher-level planning and coordination mechanism to allow the successful and scalable deployment of such solutions in real life use cases. SMARTHANDLE is a research and innovation action (RIA) nevertheless, it acknowledges that such technologies can be meaningful only if they lead to solutions that address real life needs. Thus it has engaged 3 use cases from the consumer goods (MENICON-handling of deformable, delicate and high precision parts: contact lenses), Metal Industries (ALUMIL- packaging of large variable section materials: aluminum profiles) and automotive tier-1 suppliers (ABEE- disassembly of complex products: batteries) involving dexterous operations that are not possible to implement with the existing technologies. SSH aspects will be addressed, demonstrating benefits for workers by reducing their involvement in unsafe and unhealthy tasks, improving their working conditions when working in areas where the SMARTHANDLE reconfigurable solutions will operate.

The productivity of the serial production model is compromised by the need to perform changes in the production equipment that cannot support multiple operations in dynamic environments. Low cost labour is no longer an option for EU manufacturers due to the fast rise of wages and the increasing costs of energy and logistics. Manual tasks cannot be fully automated with a good ratio of cost vs robustness using standard robots due to: high product variability, dedicated process equipment and high cost of maintenance by expert users. The answer to this challenge lays in the creation of production concepts that base their operation on the autonomy and collaboration between production resources. The vision of THOMAS is: “to create a dynamically reconfigurable shopfloor utilizing autonomous, mobile dual arm robots that are able to perceive their environment and through reasoning, cooperate with each other and with other production resources including human operators”. The objective of THOMAS are to: - Enable mobility on products and resources. Introducing mobile robots able to navigate in the shopfloor and utilize dexterous tooling to perform multiple operations. - Enabling perception of the task and the environment using a) the individual resource’s and b) collaborative perception by combining sensors of multiple resources - Dynamic balancing of workload. Allowing the resources to communicate over a common network and automatically adjust their behaviour by sharing or reallocating tasks dynamically. - Fast programming and automatic execution of new tasks by a) automatically generating the robot program for new products and b) applying skills over the perceived environment to determine required adaptations - Safe human robot collaboration, eliminating physical barriers, by introducing cognitive abilities that allow the detection of humans and their intentions THOMAS will demonstrate and validate its developments in the automotive and the aeronautics industrial sectors.