Digital Innovation Hubs for Enhancing the Technology Transfer and Digital Transformation of the European Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

The European manufacturers are dealing with shorter product life-cycles and smaller batch sizes. Especially, the high-value products tend to be fully personalised, which makes the automatisation of the production difficult. However, the trend is that the production needs to be predictable and fully traceable to the process and even to the tool level. This adds pressure to have better data collection methods and also to increase of automation in different levels of production. The emergence of new technologies in the field of robotics allows the utilisation of automation in flexible manner. Within all areas of robotics, the demand for collaborative systems is rising as well. The level of desired collaboration and increased flexibility will only be reached if the systems are developed as whole e.g. perception, reasoning and physical manipulation. However, at the same time there is concerns on how to attract capable personnel to the factories. In order to fully implement and utilise the new robotics technologies the industry needs capable resources. For answering these needs there has been several attempts to build different types of industrial ecosystems to facilitate better the technology and knowledge transfer, and share of expertise. The main aim of the paper is to review recent actions regarding the robotics projects forming industrial ecosystems in the Horizon 2020 framework programme, and then introduce the TRINITY Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) project approach to form an industrial ecosystem in the field of robotics.