Cognitive Systems & Robotics Laboratory

KLEFER Application Experiment – Automation in Manufacturing Logistics ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

KLEFER Application Experiment – Automation in Manufacturing Logistics

KLEFER SA plans to expand its production capacity to accommodate larger orders addressing the continuously growing interest of the market. Currently, manual intra-shopfloor transportations constitute a barrier that holds this initiative back. Therefore, KLEFER seeks the automation of its manufacturing logistics that will increase the production flexibility, adaptability and expandability and will enable KLEFER to meet its scale-up objectives. KLAPPER consortium involves KLEFER manufacturing SME and CERTH Research Institute (also a satellite node to L4MS) to realize a Hybrid (human-robot collaboration) automated logistics solution through the conduction of a pilot Application Experiment (AE) that will prove the ability of L4MS tools, to automate KLEFER’s intra-shopfloor transportations with the collaboration of humans and AGVs, within a short deployment period. Specifically, currently manual pushed containers with raw materials are transported from the warehouse to the assembly line and it is anticipated that within KLAPPER, this procedure will be automated exploiting AGVs capable of automatically transporting these raw materials. Moreover, currently manually driven forklifts transport metal flat sheets from warehouse to dedicated workstations and half-finished parts among the consecutive workstations towards the final assembly line. However, the availability of the forklifts is not always guaranteed, whereas communication among workstations is not automated. Within KLAPPER interconnection and constant situation awareness will be facilitated by integrating advanced Human Machine Interfaces to the forklifts in order to automate these procedures and optimize the use of forklifts within the shopfloor. To achieve its objective KLAPPER will build upon the IoT platform OPIL (Open Platform for Innovations in Logistics) together with 3D simulation tool (Visual Components). Connecting factory equipment to one IoT platform and testing the logistics process virtually enables cost-effective deployment of configurable human-robot logistics solutions.