ERF Workshop 2021: Towards Applied AI in Agile Production, Logistics and Lab Automation

Organiser:

Dr. Michael Suppa, Dr. Maximo Roa, Roboception GmbH, Germany

Dr. Patrick Courtney, Tec-connection

Dr. Niki Kousi, University of Patras

Prof. Markus Vincze, TU Vienna

Motivation and Objectives:

Perception is one of the key technologies for flexible production, including applications such as pick and place, machine tending, assembly, finishing, and quality testing. Applications in domains outside traditional manufacturing scenarios are in general more challenging, but the COVID pandemic has highlighted the need to use automation in environments where the health risks for humans are too high, e.g. test sampling and processing facilities.

The introduction of robotics in human-dominated environments demands a fast adaptability of the system. Recent developments in 3D object detection and pose estimation algorithms as well as machine learning opened up new ways in these challenging domains.

Therefore, the combination of machine learning and classical methods aim at providing reliability, robustness and flexibility at the same time to fulfill the requirements. This connection of these methods with innovative perception approaches show great potential for coping with requirements in lab automation, agile production and smart logistics.

In this workshop, use cases from industry are presented and then discussed in an interactive session with the attendees. The main goal is to create synergies and potential collaborations between researchers and industry, to facilitate the introduction of recent perception technologies into new scenarios.

Agenda

14:05 Introduction and definition of key questions, Dr. Michael Suppa, Roboception GmbH

14:10 Innovations in AppliedAI, Prof. Markus Vincze, TU Vienna

14:25 Applied AI in Logistics and Industrial Automation, Dr. Michael Suppa, Roboception GmbH

14:40 Applied AI in Industrial Automation in EC projects ODIN and THOMAS, Dr. Niki Kousi, LMS, University of Patras

14:55 Challenges and Requirements from the Lab Automation Perspective, Dr. Patrick Courtney, Tec-connection

15:10 Interactive session/round table discussion

15:20 Conclusion and take home messages