WELCOME TO THE THIRD EDITION OF REMODEL NEWSLETTER!!!

This newsletter is a publication of the REMODEL project. Its goal is to provide information about the project activities and to showcase the project achievements.

REMODEL (Robotic technologies for the manipulation of complex deformable linear objects) project is a four-year project funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 programme. The project consortium involves eleven partners.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the technologies developed in REMODEL, a comprehensive set of industrial manufacturing use cases involving DLOs manipulation are being implemented and studied: the switchgear wiring (IEMA), the wiring harness manufacturing for both automotive and aerospace applications (ELEVEZ and ELIMCO), the wiring harness assembly on a car cockpit (VWP) and the hose handling (ENKI).

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During last year, three General Assembly meeting were held.

In November 2021, all partners participated in 5th General Assembly of the project, the meeting took place online due the situation of pandemic around the world. During the meeting, all work packages were discussed in detail, containing that all work done in the M18-M24 period and the plans and activities for the next M24-M30 period.

In May 2022, all REMODEL partners participated in the 6th General Assembly. After two and a half years, the meeting was face-to-face. The two-day meeting was held at TUM’s facilities in Munich. During the meeting, the work carried out in the last six months and the plans and activities for the next period were explained, mainly focused on the integration of the different technologies in the use cases.

In October 2022, the 7th General Assembly meeting were held. The two-day meeting was held at TECNALIA’s facilities in San Sebastian. During the meeting, all work packages were discussed in detail, containing that all work done in the M30-M36 period and the plans and activities for the next M36-M42 period.

Finally, in December 2022, the second review of the REMODEL project will be held. The meeting will take place online. The REMODEL consortium will present the progress made during this second period.

UNIBO, TAU and UCLV organized a Special Session on “Cyber-Physical Systems for Deformable Object Manipulation” during the 5th IEEE International Conference On Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems ICPS 2022 that took place from 24th to 26th of May 2022 at the University Of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.

This Special Session covered all the objectives of the REMODEL project since manipulation of flexible objects such as clothes, cables and food is relevant to both industrial and household environments. In particular, the factory of the future will witness the increase of robotic manipulation skills allowing robots to carry out autonomous tasks, independently of materials, sizes, shapes and other product properties thanks to enhanced perception and interaction capabilities provided by devoted sensors, processing and control algorithms as well as purposely designed handling tools. This will bring new opportunities to human-intensive labor manufacturing processes like the ones dealing with fabrics, ropes, cables and wires where the routing and fitting tasks are calling for advanced manipulation techniques. This new robotic ability will impact several production scenarios in which human work is widely adopted due to the complexity in the objects, materials and manipulation tasks, characterized by unpredictable initial configuration as well as large deformability and plasticity

The REMODEL project reached TRL5, meaning that all the developed technologies are designed and implement the requirements of the industrial use cases addressed in the project and all the integration issues have been considered. The implementation of the final demonstrations at TRL6 is now under development and is expected to be concluded by Oct. 2023