“We are looking to create a new industrial ecosystem. We are optimizing production processes through a unique combination of smart instrumentation, metrology, artificial intelligence, virtualization, and augmented reality,” says OPTIMAI project coordinator Dr. Nikolaos Dimitriou of the Hellas Research and Technology Centre (CERTH-ITI).
Televés is one of the participating companies, which will primarily act as the end user (pilot) in this project. More specifically, the pilot will focus on the antenna production line, due to the highly automated and complex environment where more than 10 robotic cells work in a coordinated manner to manufacture more than one million antennas per year in a fully automated way
The three-year project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, is shaping the factories of the future with its unique suite of smart technologies designed for the manufacturing sector. Launched in January 2021, OPTIMAI has just entered its second year.
The manufacturing industry has spent the last few decades in a continuous state of technological revolution with the progressive introduction of ICT, robotics, and automation technologies, and more recently, the introduction of digitization technologies on the production floor. OPTIMAI is now further revolutionizing current industry practices by bringing together and promoting several enabling technologies that strengthen human-machine collaboration.
Dr. Dimitriou and his team have designed the OPTIMAI toolset, which will initially be tested and validated in factories focused on antenna manufacturing at Televés and microelectronics assembly in Greece, Spain, and the UK, respectively. The highly adaptable solutions will then be applied in a wide range of industrial environments and marketed throughout Europe.
“Our goal is to achieve an optimal balance between fast, cost-effective and reliable production options that have a significant impact on industrial competitiveness,” explains Dr. Dimitriou.
The main components of the toolkit developed by the contributing organizations (including Televés in Santiago de Compostela) include a decision support system that detects and issues early notifications of defects, a continuous production inspection, monitoring, and quality system powered by smart sensors, a smart marketplace for scrap metal recycling, digital twins for industrial process simulation and forecasting, and, of course, a comprehensive regulatory and ethical framework surrounding the technologies.
Fueling the current transformative phase of the Industrial Revolution known as Industry 4.0, the project's innovations go beyond the state of the art and pave the way for a smarter, more digitized European manufacturing sector.
