The European commission awards 11 mill euro to enable AI enhanced robotics systems for smart manufacturing

The European project COGNIMAN targets for a more cognitive and automatized European industry, and a better solution to increase the transparency of production and waste. 3B Fibreglass, member of Eyde Cluster, will participate with a pilot site, in cooperation with NORCE and 13 partners.

COGNIMAN strives to shift the future design of manufacturing processes for strengthening European manufacturing capacity. It aims to improve flexibility and adaptivity by tackling significant challenges of dynamic operations, efficiency, and effectivity for clean, safe, and cost-effective production.

Companies and researchers from Norway, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Italy are collaborating in this 4 years project. 3B Fibreglass is the Norwegian company who will host one of the projects four pilots on demonstrating cognitive development in the industry. The other three pilots are in Ireland, Italy and Ireland.

Safety standards and waste

- We are targeting a huge problem in the industry: how to deal with continuous changes in the production and supply processes, which are actually causing downtime, increasing costs and waste during production. Manufacturing industries need to be able to adapt very fast to changes and keep up productivity and efficiency. It is a gigantic task to change the industrial processes, with their traditions, says Nabil Belbachir coordinator of the project and research director in NORCE.

Several manufacturing plants are inconsistent and difficult to automate, like glass fibre production. It can be challenging to change the whole industry, with many old companies, with their way of running the production. So, the pilot is going to focus on two things: Safety and waste.

 If you can reinforce some of the operations with AI-enhanced predictive and robotized processes, you can reduce the downtime, waste and risk of accidents and harm to humans and production. AI and robotics have a significant role in the cognitive development in the industry and a huge potential for flexible manufacturing. 

Robot+human side by side

- We will try to automatize it as far as we can, first where robots and AI support and help people in the production, says Belbachir.

He adds that robots and human side by side, will reduce the burden on the operators and lead to a safer and smarter production.

About COGNIMAN

COGNIMAN will provide the means to facilitate flexible, resilient, reconfigurable, safe, sustainable, and efficient smart manufacturing by integrating simulation, models, digital twins, sensors, Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning), data processing and analytics, robotics, and autonomous systems in a human-centric modular toolbox. The concept can be easily adapted to new, varying manufacturing processes and environments with the ultimate objective of boosting the European technology and manufacturing sectors competitiveness towards industrial leadership in global markets, as well as to reduce the environmental footprint of manufacturing activities.

The project will run for 4 years starting January 1th 2023, 11 million Euros are invested, and there are 4 pilots, and a total of 15 partners involved. 

Read more here at NORCE`s webpage