Collaborative robots (cobots) are expected to play an important role in strengthening the capacity to manufacture goods in a sustainable and competitive way, empowering of end-users and workers, enhancing safety and preventing health risk in the workplace, with a new human-centered paradigm.

Cobots can share the same workplace with humans, physically interacting with them in the execution of shared tasks, in which the expertise of operators and repeatability of robots can be merged. The implementation of collaborative applications is still tough for non-skilled operators, and several fundamental issues remain to be addressed. The new generation of cobots for industry should be endowed with improved tools for rapid deployment and reconfiguration. Such ambitious goals become even more challenging in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), where the adoption of sophisticated technologies is often prevented by the need of specialized workers. Such a lack of innovation in the production lines increases the risk for a SME of failing to cope with market change and consumer individualization.

DYNAMICA project will develop and deliver tools that will allow an enterprise to rapidly install a new cobot, run it safely in the factory environment, and easily re-configure it to accomplish changed tasks or environmental conditions, overcoming the current barriers that limit the full usability of collaborative robots. More in detail, the DYNAMICA project will address the scientific and technological improvement of the following three key research topics.