IDEAS · Instantly Deployable Evolvable Assembly Systems

Discussions held by the IDEAS consortium members with a wide range of industrial sectors all lead to the same conclusion: the further development of assembly equipment still requires sophisticated answers from science. In addition, current major road mapping efforts, such as ManuFuture, FutMan and EUPASS, clearly underlined that true industrial sustainability will require far higher levels of systems’ autonomy and adaptability. ManuFuture’s new paradigm “adding value instead of cost competition” leads to a new approach to production technology and proves that the solutions required for the next step ahead clearly are not “state of the art”. In accordance with these suggestions, the IDEAS consortium aims at developing a demonstrator/technological solution that proves that assembly equipment can be highly adaptable. Such a step will be based on the further development of the Evolvable Assembly Systems (EAS) paradigm, and its integration with the results of other EC projects (IPROMS, SOCRADES, EUPASS). EAS is now an established paradigm , and previous projects (EUPASS, A3) have demonstrated that process-oriented assembly modules may be effectively re-used if applied with distributed control systems: EAS allows the development of adaptive modules for each individual assembly process. In principle this is possible as it was proven in the laboratories of Schneider, Masmec, and Festo. However, this needs to be combined with real-time adaptability and advanced control solutions in order to attain self-learning and self-diagnosing systems: true adaptability. These IDEAS objectives go well beyond what is commercially exploitable today. To achieve this, IDEAS is designed to work on respective components with intrinsic machine intelligence, on adaptive control and on control architecture. The results will be used in a demonstrator assembly line, requested by two industrial partners, developed by the IDEAS consortium. This will validate its Adaptability and Responsiveness.