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Industrial Technologies INNOVATION
Generic perception modules for robot guidance
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Market Maturity: Market Ready
These are innovations that are outperforming in innovation management and innovation readiness, and are considered to be "Ready for the market". Learn more
Market Creation Potential
This innovation was assessed by the JRC’s Market Creation Potential indicator framework as having a Noteworthy” level of Market Creation Potential. Only innovations that are showing multiple signals of market creation potential are assigned a value under this indicator system. Learn more
Go to Market needs
Needs that, if addressed, can increase the chances this innovation gets to (or closer to) the market incude:
  • Prepare for Market entry
  • Secure capital
  • Scale-up market opportunities
Location of Key Innovators developing this innovation
Key Innovators
UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDG)
This innovation contributes to the following SDG(s)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 9
Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

The UN explains: "Investments in infrastructure – transport, irrigation, energy and information and communication technology – are crucial to achieving sustainable development and empowering communities in many countries. It has long been recognized that growth in productivity and incomes, and improvements in health and education outcomes require investment in infrastructure."

The EU-funded Research Project
This innovation was developed under the Horizon 2020 project THOMAS with an end date of 30/09/2020
  • Read more about this project on CORDIS
Description of Project THOMAS
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.

Innnovation Radar's analysis of this innovation is based on data collected on 17/12/2019.
The unique id of this innovation in the European Commission's IT systems is: 19088