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Scaling robots down for SMEs
Hollywood's fascination with robots and a future where human-like machines respond to our beck and call may seem, well, remote. But the fact is nearly a million robots serve their industrial masters in major factories around the world. One EU-funded project wants to give smaller and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) similar access to robotics technology.
 There are an estimated 23 million SMEs in the European Union providing over 75 million jobs and accounting for 99% of all enterprises. In some sectors, such as textiles and construction, they contribute up to 80% of employment. SMEs are also considered vital to achieving the Union's revamped Lisbon goals of more and better growth and jobs.
But to reach this target, smaller businesses need access to research and technologies which have traditionally been the reserve of their industrial-sized cousins. The current Framework Programme (FP6, 2002-2006) budgeted €430 million to support horizontal research activities involving SMEs.
Robots perform a vast range of tasks in Europe's factories, in warehouses and laboratories, on the docks and even in surgical theatres. While increasingly common in industry, due to the onerous set-up costs robots are not widely used in SMEs. The EU SMErobot project aims to develop new, inexpensive versions of industrial robots especially for SME needs.
The four-year project includes leading research institutes, universities and the top five robot manufacturers in Europe. Thanks to increased automation, robots offer a number of advantages to industry, including high throughput and speed, generally better accuracy and improved safety conditions for staff. SMErobot – European robot initiative for strengthening the competitiveness of SMEs in manufacturing – plans to deliver many of these benefits to smaller factories in Europe as well.
“For this to happen, the metal helpers must be completely redeveloped to a certain extent,” stresses project coordinator Martin Hägele of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA. The team has set itself several ambitious goals. First, the new family of robots must respond to simple, so-called ‘intuitive' commands. They must meet all relevant safety requirements for sharing the workplace with humans. And they must be capable of being installed and put into operation within three days.
Being modular, the SME-suitable robots should be able to cope with a variety of applications, from processing wood, metal or ceramics, to drilling, sawing or lifting. But whether SMEs make use of the robot or not will be driven by more than function: it will also depend on cost. Ideally, the team notes, this should not be more than one-third of the amount that a conventional system would cost.
Enter command!
The conversion process also involves major software adaptations. With the current practice, a programmer could take up to a week to write appropriate control software for a new user – with the metre running the whole time. The plan is for any worker to be able to command the robot. To do this, the interface must be simplified and the software capable of reading and processing images, drawings, and even words and gestures.
In addition to hardware and software, SMErobot's work programme includes new financing, investment and operating models especially for SMEs. For this, it is consulting directly with companies to give a full account of their needs and resources.
For safety reasons, today's large-scale industrial robots are usually carefully isolated or, at least, their mobile parts kept out of harm's way by sensors. But the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft says it can be done without sensors. Another of the project's aims is to develop a new so-called ‘inherent safety' approach. “In this concept, the maximum force that a robot can exert is too weak to harm a human being. This can only be achieved when building the moving parts as light as possible,” the organisation explains.
“To enable the EU to become the most competitive region in the world, the Commission has emphasised research efforts aimed at strengthening knowledge-based manufacturing in SMEs, as agreed at the Lisbon Summit and … pointed out at MANUFUTURE-2003,” concludes the SMErobot website. | 
