Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - HUMAN (HUman MANufacturing)

Teaser

EU manufacturers are increasingly adopting automation solutions that can improve productivity and reduce costs. Enterprises’ ability to utilize these technologies may be their single most important competitive advantage, and the specific skills, experiences, competences, and...

Summary

EU manufacturers are increasingly adopting automation solutions that can improve productivity and reduce costs. Enterprises’ ability to utilize these technologies may be their single most important competitive advantage, and the specific skills, experiences, competences, and flexibility of workers are pivotal to and at the core of this ability. To create a healthy workplace and increase the competitiveness of the manufacturing firms, the creation of an optimal environment for human automation integration and cooperation that harnesses and supports the workers’ capabilities is needed.

The HUMAN project, with 13 partners from 6 European countries, has defined and demonstrated workplaces where automation and human workers operate in harmony to improve the productivity, quality, performance of the factory as well as the worker satisfaction and safety.

The objectives of the HUMAN project are:
- Improving the integration of humans with their workplace.
- Enhancing the monitoring and wellbeing of human automation co-operation.
- Stimulating and advancing human-automation interaction and co-operation for optimal performance and achievement of complex tasks.
- Establishing adaptable workplaces and tasks to human cognitive and physical.

These objectives has been achieved by developing and employing physical, conceptual, methodological, technological, and knowledge-based tools. 3 use case companies from the Furniture Manufacturing (ROYO Group), Automation Manufacturing (COMAU), & Defence & Aerospace (AIRBUS) sectors have been involved.

Proposed advances offered by the HUMAN solutions will remove the barriers for:
- Adaptability and flexibility of humans to continuously changing workplaces.
- Alignment of new and complex tasks with human cognitive and physical skills.
- And synchronization of enterprise goals with human.
These advancements will in turn have significant impacts on higher customization capability, productivity, quality, worker satisfaction, and empower competitive position of the EU manufacturers.

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Conclusion of the action:
All objectives has been met.

Work performed

A driving motivation has been to ensure that the project creates value, increasing potential sustainability. The main work in the first period of the project entailed understanding the user context adopting design-thinking principles to support a co-design approach towards the identification of user needs and capture of user requirements. The emphasis was on the involvement of the relevant stakeholders from each end-user organization, including the key beneficiary of the HUMAN solution – the operator. Through the process, five different services were identified to support the users:
• The exo-skeleton service for physical adaption (short-term support)
• The Knowledge in time (KIT) service for cognitive adaption (short-term support)
• The Social Knowledge Network (SKN) for knowledge sharing (long term support)
• The Work Optimzation Service (WOS) for work place redesign (long term support)
• The Shopfloor Insight Intelligence (SII) for analysing processes (long term support)

In the final part of the project, the SKN was disregarded as the users could not confirm the need. Instead, the exoskeleton service was split in two, one for support of upper-limbs and one for pelvic/lower-limbs.

Conclusions of the action:
The project have completed the development of all planned HUMAN services, including the integration and functionality with the HUMAN Core (encompassing the wearable devices, the short-term reasoning engine (STRE), the long-term reasining engine (LTRE), and the intervention manager (IM – including the integration with the wearable devices). All services have undergone extensive validation in the production environments of the case companies.

In order to achieve this impact, results are communicated to the widest audience possible. The following dissemination tools have been created:
- Creation of project\'s website
- Social media channels
- Joint press release with cluster of H2020 related projects
- Presentations at 39 events, meeting partners and projects
- A total of 17 scientific articles

During the project, the following business opportunities has been identified:
- One partner acquired part ownership of another, creating a direct and strong channel for exploitation of the work on the exoskeletons.
- New revenue streams for partner derived from products based on the exoskeleton research results.
- A new company for assistive augmented reality based on the Knowledge-In-Time service involving three different partners have been created and included as partner (KIT-AR Ltd.)

Exploitation plans have been created for all partners.

Final results

The advances offered by the HUMAN solutions will remove the barriers for:
- Adaptability and flexibility of humans to continuously changing workplaces
- Alignment of new and complex tasks with human cognitive and physical skills
- Synchronization of enterprise goals with human expectations.

HUMAN has participated and presented in 39 events ranging from industrial events, workshops and conferences. The project has collaborated with the projects A4Blue, Factory2Fit, Inclusive, and Manuwork via the ACE Factories Cluster. The creation of knowledge has been evidenced in the deliverables created. Existing patents by partners have been expanded upon and three new patents have been filed by two of the partners as a direct result of the project.

During the project, the following business opportunities has been identified:
- One partner acquired part ownership of another, creating a direct and strong channel for exploitation of the work on the exoskeletons.
- New revenue streams for partner derived from products based on the exoskeleton research results.
- A new company for assistive augmented reality based on the Knowledge-In-Time service involving three different partners have been created.

Website & more info

More info: http://humanmanufacturing.eu/.