Automation and Robotics for EUropean Sustainable manufacturing (AREUS)

Research Project, 2013 – 2016

European Factories of the Future will have to be smart and green: SMART: high performance, reconfigurable, adaptive and evolving factories based on robotic technologies, GREEN: reduced ecological footprint through a more efficient use, at factory level, of material and energy resources.Industrial Robotics is the strategic technology needed to keep the European Manufacturing leading edge, unfortunately it is intrinsically energy intensive, and its massive adoption compromises factories sustainability. The AREUS project objective is to overcome this limitation providing an innovative integrated technology and engineering platform, intrinsically interdisciplinary, modular and configurable based on four innovations:1. An integrated set of Energy Consumption reduction technologies (R-ECO) based on a novel factory electrical power supply system to exchange, harvest, store and recover energy at factory level improving the use of renewable energy sources2. A Robotic production systems Integrated Design and simulation environment (R-ID) for the eco-efficient design of robotic plants focused on the simulation of energy flows under a co-evolving product-process-robotic production systems approach3. A Robotic manufacturing processes OPTimization environment (R-OPT) for the optimal sustainable production scheduling under a control engineering approach4. LCA methods(R-LCA) to assess and optimize both environmental and economic costs linked with the flows of Material, Energy and Waste (MEW) of co-evolving products and processes realized with robotic production systems.These building blocks will enable the modular and scalable/progressive development of singularly optimized sustainable robotic manufacturing applications (or the re-adaptation of existing production facilities) and will be demonstrated on 7 industrial case studies for their future exploitment.