ARISE Experiments
HARMONY
Orchestrating Human-Robot Collaboration for Sustainable Manufacturing
HARMONY: A collaborative Industry 5.0 project integrating modular robotics, AI and FIWARE to enhance human-robot interaction, improve production efficiency, ensure product quality, and support sustainable and adaptable manufacturing processes.
The Challenge: Balancing Efficiency, Safety, and Sustainability in Manufacturing
Modern manufacturing, particularly in high-precision sectors like healthy food ingredient production, faces a complex set of demands. Industries strive for enhanced production efficiency and consistent product quality, but often at the cost of repetitive or physically demanding tasks for human operators. This can lead to safety concerns and limit the ability of workers to engage in higher-value activities. There’s a critical need for solutions that not only optimize processes but also prioritize human well-being and align with stringent sustainability goals. The challenge lies in seamlessly integrating advanced automation without compromising the invaluable human element.
Our Solution: HARMONY's Human-Centric Industry 5.0 Approach
HARMONY is a collaborative Industry 5.0 project that envisions a human-centric industrial transformation. We are developing a modular robotic solution that integrates advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and digital twin technologies to empower human operators, improve safety, and optimize efficiency in high-precision manufacturing tasks, with a specific focus on the sustainable production and packaging of healthy food ingredients.
Key innovations include:
- Predictive HRI: Our system goes beyond reactive responses, implementing real-time human activity recognition and intention prediction. This allows robots to proactively adapt their behavior, anticipating human needs and enhancing safety by 15% compared to existing solutions.
- Adaptive Robotics: Powered by ROS2 modules, our robots can handle repetitive and physically demanding activities like packaging and hydraulic press operation, freeing human operators for more complex tasks.
- FIWARE-Enabled Condition Monitoring: Leveraging IoT sensors and advanced analytics, our FIWARE-powered modules provide real-time data visualization and anomaly detection. This optimizes energy consumption (expected 10% reduction) and maintains ideal environmental conditions, ensuring consistent product quality and reducing downtime by 15%.
- Automated Packaging & Environmental Control: The modular architecture integrates automated packaging with environmental monitoring, optimizing energy efficiency and ensuring consistent product quality.
Through these advancements, HARMONY accelerates the adoption of Industry 5.0 technologies, aligning directly with European Green Deal objectives for sustainable and inclusive industrial automation.
Human Centricity: Elevating the Operator's Role
At its core, HARMONY embodies the principles of human-centric automation, ensuring that technology augments, rather than replaces, human capabilities.
- Empowering Operators: By automating repetitive and physically demanding tasks, workers can focus on higher-value activities such as quality control, process optimization, and creative problem-solving, leading to increased job satisfaction and productivity.
- Enhanced Safety & Ergonomics: The system reduces human exposure to high-pressure machinery and physical strain. Real-time environmental monitoring, predictive maintenance, and ergonomic design (following ISO 11228 standards) contribute to safer and more comfortable working conditions.
- Shared Autonomy: Robots handle routine operations while operators retain control over critical decisions via intuitive multimodal interfaces (voice, gesture, touch), fostering true collaboration.
- Inclusivity & Diversity: HARMONY is designed with accessible interfaces and adapts to diverse body types and skill levels. User testing involves a wide range of operators, prioritizing underrepresented groups to ensure broad usability and promote gender balance in industrial roles.
The ARISE Contribution: Open-Source HRI Modules for the Community
HARMONY’s significant contribution to the ARISE community and the broader robotics ecosystem is a versatile AI-powered robotic manipulation skill for complex product picking, delivered as an open-source ROS2 module. This module will be contributed to the ARISE catalog with comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and example use cases, released under a permissive open-source license (Apache 2.0) to foster widespread use and adaptation.
Key aspects of our contribution include:
- Reusable ROS2 Modules: Providing modular HRI functionalities like human activity recognition and adaptive product picking, ensuring scalability across various industrial environments.
- FIWARE Integration: Enabling condition monitoring and anomaly detection using sensor data for real-time quality assurance and predictive maintenance. This showcases an advanced use case of the ARISE All-in-One Middleware for seamless integration and data exchange.
- Standardized HRI Interfaces: Contributing to the development of standardized HRI interfaces and data models, promoting interoperability and reducing integration costs for future deployments.
- Open Innovation Ecosystem: By fostering an open-source ecosystem and collaborating with SMEs, HARMONY accelerates innovation in industrial robotics and HRI, ensuring its solutions remain impactful and sustainable.
Impact & Scalability: Driving Industrial Transformation
HARMONY is poised to deliver significant industrial, economic, and social impact:
- Industrial Added Value: Up to 30% reduction in production cycle time, 20% improvement in product quality, and 40% reduction in downtime through predictive maintenance.
- Market Potential: Targets the rapidly growing global robotics market (projected to exceed $100 billion by 2030), with a focus on collaborative robotics ($20 billion). Addresses key segments like packaging automation and predictive maintenance, both with substantial growth projections in Europe.
- Economic Resilience: Reduces operational costs by 8-12%, enabling European industries to remain globally competitive.
- Job Creation & Upskilling: Creates new roles in human-robot collaboration and provides training opportunities for workers to acquire Industry 5.0 skills, contributing to a skilled European workforce.
- Environmental Impact: Optimizes energy consumption (8-12% reduction) and promotes circular economy principles by extending the lifecycle of industrial systems and reducing redundant development.
- Shifting Perceptions: Directly addresses the perception that AI and robotics replace human labor, showcasing real-world examples of humans and robots working together effectively, fostering trust and acceptance.
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