INESC TEC highlighted at EMAF

Under the the Industry sector approach that is part of the TEC4INDUSTRY initiative, INESC TEC was once again present at the 17th International Fair of Machinery, Equipment and Services for Industry (EMAF), which took place between 21 and 24 November at Exponor, in Porto.

With the theme «Leading the way in the solutions and technologies of the future», this initiative aims to address the challenges of the Industry 4.0, to promote networking between different agents and to share ideas and businesses in the largest national event of the industry sector.

Exhibition of innovative technologies

In INESC TEC’s stand and as part of the projects ScalABLE4.0 and FASTEN and MANUFACTUR4.0, a mobile manipulator and a collaborative assembling table were demonstrated, including technologies that allowed an efficient functional integration between industrial equipment and robots, and collaborative, flexible and scalable robotics, making it possible to maximise the capacity of the global system and the vertical integration mechanisms of systems to adapt and perform.

Regarding internal logistics, the TriHO robot, which was developed by INESC TEC and financed by GERTAL, stood out in the distribution of meals in a hospital environment. It includes a navigation system that allows not to add artificial markers, to control the opening and closing of doors and elevators and an automatic docking to hospital carts.

Also the mobile manipulator developed for RENAULT's case study in the European project ColRobot was presented as an advanced solution to improve the ergonomics of the operators through the ability to perform collaborative assembly operations inside light-duty cargo vehicles.

Also present at INESC TEC’s stand were an advanced planning system using the twin digital technique, which allows the design and optimisation of plants and production systems through virtual representation; asset management and predictive maintenance solutions; and an annotation and visualisation tool to add dynamic annotations to 360-degree video.

At the PRODUTECH stand, and in partnership with ANTIPODA, SYSTRADE and TALUS, INESC TEC presented an innovative solution for integrated conveyor belts with internal logistics based on mobile robots.

Seminar and conference in parallel

In the official opening of the event, on 21 November, the “Fórum PRODUTECH & Conferência Anual Mobilizador PRODUTECH SIF” (in English “PRODUTECH Forum and Annual Conference PRODUTECH SIF”), an initiative that had the presence of a panel of experts from different areas and that included interventions from INESC TEC, namely from António Paulo Moreira from the Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIIS) and António Correia Alves from the Centre for Enterprise Systems Engineering (CESE) in Industry 4.0 and Cyber-Physical Production Systems.

The Observtech seminar entitled “Capacitar a indústria, reforçar a competitividade e potenciar o crescimento baseado no conhecimento e inovação” (in English: Empowering industry, enhancing competitiveness and fostering the growth based on knowledge and innovation”), was another initiative promoted during the event that took place on 22 November. The programme of the seminar included a presentation of the MANUFACTUR4.0 project, in which CRIIS and CESE participated.  It’s a project that aims to develop and to transfer new technologies for the naval and metal working industries in the region of Galicia and north of Portugal.

CoopWeld wins Innovation Competition

In parallel, and in order to reinforce the R&D and innovation components in the event, highlighting its importance for the development of the industry of production technologies, EMAF launched the 9th Innovation Competition in a partnership with the Portuguese Magazine “Revista Robótica”. This competition, which was oriented to all the registered exhibitors, evaluated the design, originality and operability aspects of the products and services presented.

From 22 proposals, project CoopWeld - Robotized system for welding in structural steel fabricationi - won a prize in the National Innovation category “Leonardo da Vinci”.

CoopWeld, which was developed by the SARKKIS Robotics and with the collaboration of CRIIS, applies the use of robotic welding in the manufacturing of small structural sets, working in the combination of robots, sensors and autonomous offline programming with a special focus on SME and their specific needs. In this approach, the robot is responsible for the most repetitive and time consuming tasks (welding), freeing the operator to perform tasks of higher added value (assembly).

International Fair is constantly growing

With the participation of about 450 companies and approximately 45, 000 visitors, the focus of the organisation remained in the internationalisation of technologies, in the innovation of industry and in the specialised technical expertise. 

Besides robotics, some of the sectors on display were machines, tools, logistics and transport, laboratories, instrumentation, automation and control, computer science applied to industry, security, among others.

The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC and UP-FEUP.