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Intellimech draws up prototypes of mechatronic devices in order to develop innovative and cross-sector applications that may be of interest to our members. We manage research projects on behalf of our members as well as third-party companies.
Intellimech takes part in regional, national and European mechatronic-related competitions, involving member companies as case pilots.
WATCHMAN aims to develop a hub of competencies and experiments on Artificial Intelligence applications in the manufacturing sector, with a particular focus on Machine Vision techniques. Two demonstrators will be established to test advanced deep-learning techniques applied to images analysis and defects recognition in products at the end of the production process, thus increasing the quality level.
Consorzio Intellimech is leading the project which involves a group of 7 partners: Brembo, Fincons, S.A.L.F. Laboratorio Farmacologico, SmartRobots, SorintLab, University of Bergamo, Vision.
The project started in February 2020 and will close in September 2022. It has a total value of € 6,601,061 of which € 2,970,099 is co-financed by the Lombardy Region in the framework of “Call Hub for Research and Innovation” under the POR-FESR 2014-2020 funds.
Welding is a manufacturing process that joins materials, usually metals or thermoplastics, using high heat to melt the parts and allow them to cool, resulting in fusion. Just how indispensable welding is explained by the fact that almost all industrial and craft activities make use of this process.
Whilst this technology for series and large-scale applications has been and still is flourishing, for the welding of small components it is less developed in terms of automation and control techniques. If in the case of large welds that have a strong impact on safety, the controls are often defined by regulations, in the case of small welds that have little impact on safety but a heavy impact on product quality, quality control becomes complex. In fact, the traditional non-destructive inspections that are used for this type of process are not feasible in these cases, mainly due to the high costs associated with them. Typically, therefore, the control is carried out by visual inspection operators.
The objective of this project is to overcome this gap by developing a prototype bench for the fine-tuning of algorithms and a vision system that is capable of automatically assessing the quality of the welding process in the case of small dimensions (size less than 10 mm) by means of artificial intelligence algorithms applied to computer vision.
Intellimech, in the context of the TECH FAST Lombardia, call for tenders, worked on the VIPS project -sistemi di Visione per Piccole Saldature, dealing with:
1. Development of the system hardware
2. Development of the vision algorithms
3. Development of the information architecture for the historicisation of weld images
4. Integration of the vision system for the automated inspection of welding defects.
The VIPS project set itself the goal of using the results of this research in an industrial context so that they could be trained efficiently, i.e. with the collection of a few training examples and with the help of a domain expert to guide the learning (human-in-the-loop) of modern neural networks for the localisation and classification of defects to be detected. The project led to the development of a prototype with non-specific hardware elements, i.e. colour camera, macro optics for welding magnification and illuminators, and new knowledge in terms of image analysis algorithms.
The project started in December 2021 and ends on February 28 2023. The total budget of the project is € 215,507.78, 50% of which will be co-financed by the Regione Lombardia within the programme “INVESTIMENTI IN FAVORE DELLA CRESCITA E DELL’OCCUPAZIONE” through POR-FESR 2014-2020 funds.
SHOP4CF is a European-funded project that aims to create a single infrastructure for the cost-effective deployment of human-centred industrial applications. In the project, 20 partners develop a comprehensive software platform containing a wide range of components covering a broad spectrum of industrial requirements, especially in the modern, flexible and data-rich manufacturing context. The project started in January 2020 and ends on 31st December 2023. The overall budget is € 16,171,592.15, of which € 15,008,467.00 will be contributed by the EU within the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program, under grant agreement number 873087.
In addition to the core consortium that submitted the original SHOP4CF proposal, the project has implemented pilot projects that serve as test facilities and seeds for platform adoption. Each pilot is executed by a single partner or consortium of two to four partners, including at least one SME. The additional use- cases rely on newly proposed components, existing SHOP4CF components, or a combination of them to be tested in a manufacturing environment.
Intellimech, together with Elettrocablaggi S.r.l., is implementing the pilot WARNING – Worker Augmented Reality guidaNce IN aGile production shopfloor. WARNING proposes to demonstrate the effectiveness of an Augmented Reality (AR) application to support human operators during the assembly phase through a properly designed AR module (WARN: Worker Augmented Reality guidaNce), developed and based upon the TXT (https://www.txtgroup.com) commercial platform Pacelab WEAVR and completely integrable with the SHOP4CF architecture. WARN will be able to integrate advanced HMI technologies, shopfloor data, IT corporate data, CAD drawings and existing SHOP4CF components to provide a user-friendly guide for assemblers, supporting workers and reducing the risk of product non-conformity in the agile manufacturing assembly context.
Europe has the potential to specialise in digital solutions on a global scale, however, everyone agrees that it is not fully exploited. The main barrier is the fragmentation of markets and the lack of uniform regulations and procedures. A new EU initiative supporting the digitalisation of industry: Digital Innovation Hubs is there to remedy this. The DIH centres are hubs of complex services, where businesses, and especially SMEs and start-ups, can improve their competencies connected to streamlining production processes, products, and services by implementing digital technologies.
The goal of the S3HubsinCE project is to build competencies of regional DIHs in Central and Eastern Europe by exchanging experience and good practices between project partners. The competencies are built in the following technology areas: data analytics, machine vision, factory and process automation, IIoT, and advanced and smart materials.
The 10 project partners, coming from Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, and Hungary, will jointly develop a network of Central European “RIS3 Champions”, which will initiate a new generation of innovation networks.
QU4LITY is the biggest European project dedicated to Autonomous Qu4lity (AQ) and Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) in Industry 4.0.
Qu4lity will demonstrate, in a realistic, measurable, and replicable way an open, certifiable, highly standardised, SME-friendly and transformative shared data-driven ZDM product and service model for Factory 4.0 through 14 pilot lines.
Qu4lity will also demonstrate how the European industry can build unique and highly tailored ZDM strategies and competitive advantages through an orchestrated open platform ecosystem, ZDM atomized components, and digital enablers across all phases of the product and process lifecycle. The main goal is to build an autonomous quality model to meet the Industry 4.0 ZDM challenges.
Qu4lity started on the 1st of January of 2019 and will last 39 months. (EU Contribution 15M€, Partners: 45, Countries: 13)
FASTEN is a joint EU-BR project that aims to develop, demonstrate, validate, and disseminate an integrated and open modular framework for efficiently producing highly customized products. This will be achieved by pairing digital integrated services/products to additive manufacturing processes, on top of tools for decentralizing decision-making and data interchange. Software technologies will be applied to build a fully connected additive manufacturing system by exploiting robotics, automation, and simulation, as well as optimization and prescriptive analytics technologies. Demonstration of these technologies will be performed in two pilot cases: ThyssenKrupp Elevadores in Brazil and Embraer Portugal in Europe (aeronautics).
FASTEN is composed of 10 partners, 5 from Europe and 5 from Brazil. Specifically, from Europe the partners are INESC TEC (EU project coordinator) and Embraer Portugal S. A, Politecnico Di Milano, PACE Aerospace Engineering and Information Technology and Intellimech; from Brazil, the partners are INESC P&D Brasil (BR project coordinator), PUCRS, Bradel, ThyssenKrupp and Embraer.
The MAP4ID project fully addresses some of the emerging issues in the context of enterprise information systems and platforms supporting the development of new paradigms emerging from the migration towards the Industry 4.0 paradigm.
The partnership involved in the development of MAP4ID has decided to address the ambitious goal of developing a research phase on three purely industrial issues dictated by as many different key users involved collaterally to the project, which is aimed at the definition of a new ambitious product/service to be brought to market in a synergy of intent and resources among all actors involved.
The aim of the project is to create a technological contribution that can be quickly extended and customized to meet the diverse business needs of small and medium-sized SMEs in filling a gap in information systems and processing services that would require time, investment and qualified personnel to be realized.
The MAP4ID project, therefore, has the ambitious goal of transferring new methodologies, technologies and tools born in the world of academic research, to the industrial context, but all oriented to concrete cases of real key-users and with the stated objective of defining a platform of services that can be easily customized, used and managed in daily operations in different contexts and in different industrial scenarios.
In many of the operational scenarios where the project proponents have operated in the course of the most recent project initiatives, it is noted that the biggest issue was having to guarantee the company’s ownership that the data transmitted out of it was not distributed and saved on “public” cloud systems but on specific server machines installed at their premises or at the partner’s offices. This sense of concern and mistrust towards possible uncontrolled and unclear access to operational data that may characterize important competitive information for an SME with active patents on manufacturing processes or unique product features pushed them to renounce to a massive integration with the outside world and in particular with the Industrial IoT, in order to preserve the privacy and anonymity of their own production feature.
In order to address these operational issues, Intelligentia has made targeted investments over the last few years in the development of a Cloud services platform based on some of the best known and established OpenSource technologies for hosting and distributing specific content in industrial contexts. The platform called ELISA (Enterprise Light Information System Architecture) has been revised several times over the years to try to integrate the most requested features emerging from the field.
In the course of the project, leveraging the three real application cases, a new product will be realized based on the lessons learned from ELISA, but at an even lower level, i.e. a PaaS (Platform as a Service) that can be directly integrated and used also by other system integrators and partners. All this by adding the main Artificial Intelligence techniques as plug&play application modules that can be reused in different operational contexts.
The project, therefore, goes in the direction of creating a new product that leverages the state of the art and industrial applicability of data analysis and reasoning methodologies born in the field of computer science research, dropping them into three case studies in as many industrial companies belonging to the Intellimech Consortium. In particular, the case studies will concern:
– A case study on predictive maintenance applied to the context of a company producing textile looms
– A case study on production optimization in a complex environment with high production variants in the beverage industry
– A case study on vision technologies for quality and compliance of electrical panels
The project, coordinated by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, is part of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme and brings together 24 partners of excellence from 11 countries to improve global emergency preparedness.
The global economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in general but also in particular for the manufacturing sector has been tremendous. At the same time, the manufacturing sector has been a critical part of the response to the crisis.
The Eur3ka Consortium is committed to developing a resilient global outbreak response and repurposing data ecosystem space for shared emergencies, that is digitally oriented and regulation based. While trust is established at organizational and technical levels, the Eur3ka ecosystem will accelerate coordinated efforts and will keep growing building on top of key principles such as transparency, accountability, sovereignty, inclusivity, scalability, and empowerment of all existing and future networks and stakeholders active in the field at a worldwide level.
The aim of the project is to develop a trusted federation of European and global manufacturing resources for health care. The work is expected to generate improvements in healthcare industry preparedness, including 3D printing initiatives and industrial additive manufacturing services networks. Traditional factories will be able to implement the most appropriate strategies for repurposing their production lines to achieve increases in capacity for producing vital PPE and other medical supplies to meet demand.
Eur3ka started on the 1st of December of 2020 and will last 24 months.
The DITA project wants to strengthen transnational cooperation among synergic training organizations and increase the mobility opportunities of trainees in the European digital industry scene by providing an overview of available training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation, delivering and permanently maintaining an open but supervised tool (The Digital Industry Training Atlas) that will collect, connect and display synergic available training opportunities in Europe on digital transformation. The project has 2 main target groups:
1) it responds to the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s professionals or graduates working for (or being potential candidates to work for) European small and medium-sized enterprises;
2) vocational training organizations that would highly benefit from connecting to complementary organizations in their country as well as in other countries.
The project will involve at least 100 end users (learners) during the test phase and 160 during multiplier events plus 110 training organizations.
The project’s expected results are to increase the general awareness level of the current and future European workforce about available training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation; the understanding of potential synergies among the identified training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation; the internationalization strategies of life-long learning training organizations in the field of Digital Transformation.
DiH4CPS is a European project that fosters DIHs for embedding Interoperability in Cyber-Physical Systems of European SMEs. The initiative will help European enterprises overcome innovation hurdles and establish Europe as a world-leading innovator of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by creating an interdisciplinary network of Digital Innovation Hubs and solution providers focused on cyber-physical systems and embedded systems. The aim of the project is interweaving knowledge and technologies from different domains, and connect regional clusters with the pan-European expert pool of DIHs. The DIH4CPS Network will leverage and sustain its impact far beyond the project duration, creating a vibrant, overarching, and cross-sector one-stop-shop for collaboration between SMEs, DIHs, and Tech providers.
Consorzio Intellimech, Miraitek srl, Evogy, and POLIMI involve in the CPS/AI application in optimizing the energy consumption of the building, which is one of the eleven initial experiments. With the extensive existing network, they also add value to its existing knowledge transfer capabilities and guarantee the sustainability of the growing DIH network.
The project starts in January 2020 and ends on 31 December 2022. The overall budget of the project is € 9,158,683 of which € 7,999,333 will be contributed by the EU under the scheme of “Innovation action” under the EU grant 872548.
Through the DIH4AI network, research and industry are intensively collaborating to ensure the deployment of available state-of-the-art European AI capacities and capabilities. The network supports joint development and provision of ecosystem-business-technology-transformation services targeting local SMEs and tech governmental agencies.
Intellimech, in collaboration with DIH Lombardia and INESC TEC, is among the winners of the second open call with the DIH4TAKING experiment (DIHs for applicaTion of Ai for picK&place in electronIc compoNents manufacturinG).
DIH4TAKING is a Cross-DIH Inter-Regional experiment as it sees the collaboration between The regional DIH, DIH Lombardia, which supported INTELLIMECH concerning mainly business development and market analysis, and a Portuguese DIH, PRODUTECH, which provided access to the expertise and technologies of its partner INESCTEC, providing technical support for the validation phase.
This project mainly focuses on object detection and pose estimation for the picking phase of electronic components (microprocessors, heat sinks, controllers, etc.), proposing an integrated and modular perception pipeline aligned with Industry 4.0 tenets to leverage AI technologies in this sector further and similar application fields. This collaboration will allow Intellimech to extend the value proposition of its perception and pose estimation algorithms, improving their performances to embrace a new application industrial field. The proposed system architecture will feature the required flexibility to make it intuitively fine-tuneable and adaptable to the particularities of the specific industrial operation condition. Finally, the modules developed and validated will be granted a service, integrated, and offered on the AI4EU marketplace.
The project started on 1 January 2021 and will end on 31 December 2023. The project’s total budget is € 5 488 450.00, of which € the EU will fund 4 999 862.50 under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.
DIGITbrain is a European project that aims to enable small and medium-sized European manufacturing companies to benefit from an augmented digital-twin concept called Digital Product Brain (DPB). Compared to the digital twin concept, which is increasingly used by manufacturing companies today, the DPB concept will go one step further by storing data throughout the entire life cycle of a production line or a machine. The ambition of the DIGITbrain project is centred around two areas. On the one hand, the project realises an ambitious technological vision by developing the Digital Brain concept and its enabling technologies. On the other hand, it assures that these technological advances are taken up by a critical mass in the manufacturing sector, especially by SMEs and mid-caps, resulting in the smart business model MaaS, facilitated by a network of interconnected Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs). Finally, the technology and business-centred ambitions are enabling innovative use cases to be co-created and implemented in over 20 application experiments (to be added in two Open Calls).
The project started on 1st July 2020 and will be funded for three and a half years within the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (under grant agreement number 952071) by the European Commission with a budget of 8.34 million euros. DIGITbrain is composed of a consortium of 36 partners, with about 35-40 additional collaborators involved through the two Open Calls for experiments, mainly technology and manufacturing SMEs. In this framework, Intellimech has joined the DIGITbrain consortium for the 2nd Open Call, as part of the 3rd Experiment Wave. More specifically, Intellimech will support as a technology provider the implementation of Experiment 20, MonItoring And CoNTrol For REconfiGuRABLe PrEsses (INTEGRABLE), focused on the application of the DPB concept to achieve process self-adaptivity of a reconfigurable pressing line from the manufacturing company S.C.A.M.M. S.R.L. The line at issue consists of five presses in series, designed for gradually deforming metal sheets by applying predefined loads. INTEGRABLE will be devoted mainly to automating the quality control task, exploiting machine vision technologies, and correlating quality KPIs and non-conformities with the process parameters.
ARISE aims to make industrial HRI more accessible, cheaper, and easier to adapt, particularly in healthcare, internal logistics, and manufacturing.
The objectives are clearly defined. The project aims to equip European industry with a robust open-source middleware, develop a reliable human-centric HRI framework and create a sustainable ecosystem for open innovation in industrial robotics. The project consortium will announce two calls open to industry stakeholders to achieve this goal.
Four test facilities across Europe offer the expertise and infrastructure for your HRI. These include the robotic INTELLIMECH FET and JOiiNT LAB.
JOiiNT LAB will focus on ‘Re-programmable Co-bots for Flexible Manufacturing’, more specifically on improving the flexibility of collaborative robots, both in terms of hardware and software, and implementing an intelligent programming methodology to ensure adaptability to different products while preserving operators’ autonomy.
The project will use Financial Support from Third Parties [FSTP] to promote the deployment of human-centred industrial HRI based on the ARISE project’s open resources. The Intellimech-led work package focuses on supervising, coordinating, and evaluating the selected experiments.
Total Budget / EU contribution: 9,984,510€
Duration: 01/01/2024 – 01/07/2027
The AI REGIO project aims at filling 3 major gaps currently preventing AI-driven DIHs from implementing fully effective digital transformation pathways for their Manufacturing SMEs: at the policy level the Regional vs. EU gap; at the technological level the Digital Manufacturing vs. Innovation Collaboration Platform gap; at the business level the Innovative AI (Industry 5.0) vs Industry 4.0 gap.
As stated in the European Commission’s communication on Artificial Intelligence (COM(2018) 237 final) the EU should be ahead of technological developments in AI and ensure they are swiftly taken up across its economy. Boosting AI uptake in Europe is also ever more important to take the lead in manufacturing. AI REGIO will make sure that help gets where it is needed for manufacturing SMEs by exploiting and enriching the cross-border network of so-called regional Digital Innovation Hubs, competence centres from which companies can access skills and facilities not available in their region. Addressing regional, cross-regional and pan-European issues will ensure that the EU takes the lead in digital manufacturing, creating new opportunities for innovation and growth.
36 partners from 8 European countries have kick-started the EU-funded AI REGIO project; partners are on a mission to help European SMEs on the path towards artificial intelligence-driven digitalization whilst further integrating the pan-European network of regional Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs).
AI REGIO started on the 1st of October of 2020 and will last 36 months. (Project Budget: € 9.200.080,00€).
The AI REDGIO 5.0 project, funded by the European Union and starting in January 2023, involves 43 partners from 18 European countries and fosters the digital transformation of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) towards Industry 5.0 based on Artificial Intelligence ‘Edge Computing’. AI REDGIO 5.0 aims to renew and extend the partnerships born from the ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) initiative and the Vanguard initiative, in particular by leveraging the network of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHS) consolidated within the Horizon 2020 “AI REGIO” 4.0 project.
For the digital transformation of European manufacturing SMEs, the Horizon 2020 ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) programme was a flagship. Phase IV of the programme, in particular, focused on Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) and cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and digital twins. On this wave, the interregional project AI REGIO was funded, focusing on the establishment of a European network of DIHs and the application of Artificial Intelligence solutions to manufacturing SMEs. The AI REGIO project developed an innovative methodology to support the growth and collaboration of DIHs through the analysis of service portfolios and customer journeys, set up a toolkit focused on AI4EU, and defined the network ‘Didactic Factories and their TEchnology and REgulatory Sandboxes’ (TERESA).With the aim of coordinating these results and moving them towards the concept of Industry 5. 0, with the development of AI cloud technologies towards Edge Computing, with the evolution of Horizon2020 into Horizon Europe and with the evolution of Digital Europe programmes such as EDIH, Data Spaces and AI TEFs (Testing and Experimentation Facilities) for the manufacturing sector, AI REDGIO 5.0 will continue to promote the adoption of Artificial Intelligence technologies in manufacturing SMEs. The I4MS partnership and the AI REGIO project partnership involving the Vanguard regions and the different DIHs will therefore be updated and extended with the AI REDGIO 5.0 project, in order to enable a competitive ‘AI-at-the-Edge’ digital transformation of manufacturing SMEs in Industry 5.0sensitising consumers to a more conscious behaviour to ensure sustainability.
In the project, Intellimech supports the development of the Industry 5.0 Data4AI platform and Data Spaces, and the Industry 5.0 EDGE AI Toolkit & AI-On-demand platform. It also assists the company SCAMM s.r.l. in the implementation of its pilot project.
36 partners from 8 European countries initiated the EU-funded AI REGIO project; the partners are on a mission to help European SMEs on the road to AI-based digitisation by further integrating the pan-European network of regional Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs).
AI REDGIO will end in December 2025. This project was funded by the European Union under Gran Agreement No. 101092069. (EU contribution: €7 462 614.00).
AI4ENGINE (ID: 23273) deals with the development of an AI system to take advantage of the enormous amount of data produced in the textile manufacturing context and, to date, poorly exploited. The system will make it possible to analyze the status of textile machines in real time by extracting data that, integrated with the digital model of the plant, will allow the monitoring of performance indicators, process optimization and maintenance scheduling.
The leading partner, Itemalab, has in-depth competencies in the mechanical-textile field, thanks to the parent company Itema, one of the world leaders in this sector. Itemalab is a partner of Intellimech, a private research consortium of 48 high-tech enterprises dedicated to research in mechatronics. Intellimech relies on its expertise to support the consortium concerning system integration and AI. CIIRC CTU, given its experience in the design and development of industrial distributed intelligent solutions, is in charge of AI model implementation. Finally, INESC TEC, based on its 35 years of experience in R&D and technology transfer, is responsible for building the Plant Digital Model, integrating assets’ virtual models with semantic knowledge about their components and functionalities.
The connection between Itemalab and Itema will guarantee the full exploitation of the AI4ENGINE business potentialities. Furthermore, the project will originate the creation of a Learning Path with the related Digital Training Nuggets focused on the most promising digital trends in the textile manufacturing context.
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