EU Project for Industrial Robots

The EU project, which has been launched this spring and is scheduled to run for four years, is being coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart and is organizationally supported by Gesellschaft für Produktionssysteme (GPS).
"We are developing a new generation of industrial robots for small and medium-sized enterprises," says Project Coordinator Martin Haegele from Fraunhofer IPA.
With flexible, low-cost and user-friendly automation solutions, the aim of the project is to strengthen the competitiveness of the EU’s over 228,000 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing industry.

The new generation of robots developed by SMErobot is intended to achieve three goals in order to address the specific needs of small and medium-sized enterprises: first, the robot should understand easily learnable, "intuitive" commands; second, it should meet all safety-relevant requirements for sharing the workplace with human colleagues; and, third, it should be capable of being installed and put into operation within three days. Through the flexible combination of individual modules, the aim is to cut investment and operating costs to one-third.


SMErobot: a new generation of industrial robots for small and medium-sized enterprises