As part of a week-long visit to the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC CTU) in Prague, Dr. Jayant Jagtap, Associate Professor of Robotics and Cybernetics from NIMS University, met with research teams at the RICAIP Testbed Prague. This was less than three weeks after Prof. Vladimír Mařík, Principal Investigator of the RICAIP project and Scientific Director of CIIRC CTU, visited the NIMS University in Jaipur, India, together with the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Petr Fiala. We are glad to have witnessed further steps on the path of Indo-European scientific cooperation.
Testbed researchers together with the members of the Department of Intelligent Systems introduced a wide range of projects that tackle various aspects of the Industry40 production systems. Besides flexible production distributed systems, or optimisation methods, they also touched automated error recovery, different ways of detecting objects with 2D or 3D cameras for autonomous pick and place robotic operations, robotic 3D printing, a customizable gripper project for robots that are made by 3D printing, and a modular and flexible manufacturing system on robotic cells at the RICAIP Testbed Prague.
The also talked about the concept of simulations, virtual commissioning and design of robotic workstations for the electric car battery retrofitting project. The team of the Department of Intelligent Systems, that is very much connected to the work conducted in testbed, presented the results in developing the flexible manufacturing control system on the EV-battery use case and an expert system to automate the setup of smart counting machine LEGO Production. A special attention was also given to the floorplanning for factory layout optimization including the involvement of industrial simulation tools. As a proof of ESG-driven focus, energy management tools and production quality control with emphasis on zero- defect production were presented.
During the tour in the Testbed, dr. Jagtap saw a selection of the main demonstrators and technologies such as:
- the robotic line for flexible production with conveyors,
- a 5-axis Delta robot operating in an industrial #5G network and
- robotic cells with robust and easily deployable pick-and-place architecture.
We look forward to further collaboration on challenging research tasks!