VOJEXT (Value Of Joint EXperimentation in digital Technologies for manufacturing and construction) was part of the European Union's Horizon 2020 program. The project explored science-driven industrial methods for connecting humans and cyber-physical systems (CPS) and developing cognitive capabilities necessary for more efficient socio-technical and business ecosystems. With this approach, the collaborative project pursued the development of affordable, market-oriented and reconfigurable robotic systems that would serve as central components of an intelligent and scalable CPS ecosystem for the manufacturing and construction industries. Particular attention was paid to the integration of traditional and innovative AI-supported robotics and cognitive ICT developments.
In cooperation with leading partners from industry and science, VOJEXT demonstrated its extensive results in five experimental pilot projects during the final evaluation by the European Commission on September 10, 2024. These projects covered various application areas such as plastic textiles, electronics, automotive, construction and artistic crafts. The pilot projects were carried out at several locations in Europe, including Spain, Hungary, Italy and Turkey.
Artistic contribution provides new impetus for collaboration between man and machine
As part of the project, VOJEXT also made use of the S+T+ARTS initiative, which promotes art-driven innovation. Three so-called S+T+ARTS residencies were organized. These are special programs in which female artists are involved in scientific and technological research processes. In the VOJEXT residencies, artists worked closely with academic and industrial partners to explore new ways of applying VOJEXT technologies and expand the potential of human-robot interaction.
VOJEXT thus opened up new avenues of automation, covering semi- or fully automated tasks and flexible reconfigurations of production resources. The focus was on the precise manipulation of objects and devices, especially in small batch production and personalized products. Human-robot collaboration was also improved, based on safety, gender and ergonomic principles, thus enabling better working conditions.
fortiss achieves significant progress in robotics and automation
The State Research Institute of the Free State of Bavaria for Software-Intensive Systems contributed significantly to the success of the project by developing a knowledge-based control system for robots under the leadership of competence field manager Alexander Perzylo. This system automatically formalizes and interprets relevant knowledge from the fields of automation and application in order to improve the user-friendliness, flexibility and reconfigurability of robot systems.
As part of a formal knowledge representation, semantic description languages were developed to encode knowledge about products, manufacturing processes and robot platforms. To this end, the fortiss scientists developed a system that uses highly linked semantic models to dynamically derive the necessary process steps, their parameters and the resources required for execution at runtime.
In addition, fortiss, as one of the cooperating Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH), contributed to the dissemination of the project results by co-organizing several webinars and surveys. Based on the experience gained from the collaboration between art and industry (S+T+ARTS), fortiss also developed recommendations for political decision-makers.
The insights gained and system components developed as part of the research work will be further expanded by fortiss in subsequent projects and prepared for industrial use. This should both further increase the degree of autonomy of automation systems and improve the ability for self-control, as well as bring about a semantic integration of the heterogeneous production data that is generated, which enables a data-driven analysis of production through automated machine learning pipelines.