UIC SMART FACTORY

Financier:

Partners:

• CATEC
• CAPGEMINI

Summary:

The UIC Smart Factory, led by the Capgemini Group, is a project that aims to revolutionize traditional Andalusian industry through innovation combined with advanced technology. The project involves CATEC as a strategic partner, seeking to combine a company and a technology center to generate disruptive solutions that are also close to cutting-edge production.

The overall objective of the UIC is to design a research pilot in advanced manufacturing, which will take place in a production environment focused on manual production processes, common in key industries in Andalusia, such as aeronautics and the automotive industry. The proposed methods, processes, and advances are based on three fundamental pillars or lines of research:

• Smart Workplace. Focused on operator interaction with a smart, interconnected workstation through research based on the integration of the Digital Twin concept. On the other hand, autonomous decision-making systems assist and support decision-making in the production chain. Results:
  1. Production management support assistant with the ability to analyze production over long and short-term time horizons;
  2. Predictive maintenance solution to ensure the full availability and reliability of auxiliary equipment used in production;
  3. Combination of LLMs system to assist data flow analysis capabilities.
• Operator 4.0. Research and development of a multimodal and multiplatform HMI (Human Machine Interface) system that enhances human capabilities in the workplace. It also provides an active, non-intrusive health and safety system with the goal of reducing musculoskeletal injuries caused by complex postures and sequences in assembly operations to zero, and focuses on active monitoring and accident prevention in collaboration with robots. Results:
  1. Multimodal and multiplatform HMI (Human Machine Interface) system;
  2. Active and non-intrusive health and safety system.
• Cobots. The conception of a new generation of collaborative robotic platforms capable of exploiting not only information from their environment but also information provided by the Smart Workplace and, ultimately, the factory as a whole, to assist operators in the most complex manual assembly processes. This line will focus on technologies such as Robotics, Cloud/Edge Robotics, Telesensing, Teleoperation, and Cognitive Services, among others. Results:
  1. Autonomous and collaborative provisioning system;
  2. Simultaneous operations system and interactive support;
  3. Human-robot communication system;
  4. Collaborative robot for automatic screwing.

To implement the project, the project received an incentive of €549,998.43 from the Andalusian Innovation and Development Agency (IDEA) of the Andalusian Regional Government, 80% co-financed by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) for the implementation of the IUIC ALTRAN-FADA-CATEC project. The objective is to include the following: “To promote technological development, innovation, and quality research.”