Projects
Active projects
Robotic Triage For Value Retention In Circular Economy (RoboTriage)
Value: £1.8M (FEC) including £1.5M from the EPSRC
Duration: 2024-2027
In the current Circular Economy (CE) landscape, many activities fail to fully realise the potential value of products, components, and materials. Rather than being repaired, reused, or remanufactured, a significant number of products end up in mixed waste streams and are recycled, which is the least valuable end-of-life CE option. This leads to a substantial loss of residual value.
One of the critical challenges in the CE is the absence of effective and efficient methods for large-scale separation of products, which are in very different used or end-of-life conditions, into various CE options such as reuse, repair, remanufacture, repurpose, or recycle. The presence of mixed waste streams poses a significant barrier to creating tighter loops of circularity and preserving materials at their highest value for an extended period. The current methods of evaluating end-of-life options are inefficient and inaccurate as they heavily rely on human judgment, which is often based on experience and prone to bias and error.
Similar to how triage can help create priorities and organisations in healthcare systems, RoboTriage proposes a new concept, circularity triage, referring to the process of rapidly examining products, components and parts to determine their best CE option, e.g. reuse, repair, remanufacture, repurpose, or recycle.
We aim to create and develop robotic systems that can perform triage tasks by capturing the health condition data of used products, allowing for a swift evaluation of product conditions so as to group products of similar conditions, avoid mixed waste streams and recommend highest-value CE options.
RoboTriage has five objectives:
• O1: To create robotic systems that can perform triage operations (at the motion level).
• O2: To create system intelligence that enables smart planning of triage operations (task level).
• O3: To identify new patterns and connections between product history data and product conditions using autonomous large-scale robotic triage (task level).
• O4: To identify value opportunities and develop circular business models with the new patterns and connections obtained to facilitate high-value retention (system level).
• O5: To support the uptake of CE and sustainability considerations and practices by industrial partners through three flagship case studies.
RoboTriage’s academic impact transcends the manufacturing and CE domains, extending to ICT, AI, and data science. The influence of RoboTriage extends into economic, societal, and environmental domains. RoboTriage technologies have the potential to be deployed for CE purposes, thereby enhancing their scale and productivity. On average, a one percent increase in robot density correlates with a 0.8 percent increase in productivity. This will be exemplified by our 11 industrial partners and over £400k cash contributions (over £600k in-kind included) from host organisations and partners. Facilitated by RoboTriage technologies, the promotion of high-value CE options such as remanufacturing could lead to a 90% reduction in primary material usage and a 55% reduction in energy and emission impact. The impact of this project will extend to international organisations through our United Nations partners, ITU and UNESCO, both of which are also our project partners.
Details: UKRI
Robotic skill transfer and augmentation for contact-rich tasks in manufacturing (STAMAN)
Value: £1.3M (FEC) including £1M from the EPSRC
Duration: 2024-2027
STAMAN’s vision is to create AI-based mechanisms to allow robots to share and recreate obtained digital skills (e.g. motion and force/torque control strategies) to allow easy automation scale-up for contact-rich tasks. This includes considering two research questions:
1) For skill transfer – how can a contact-rich skill be quickly transferred to a different robot (e.g. transferring a bolt-nut separation skill from a high-precision robot to a low-precision robot)?
2) For skill augmentation – how can existing contact-rich skills be used to create new contact-rich skills (e.g. augmentation of rigid-material skills to deal with soft materials)?
The project will develop a portfolio of research into the science of digital skills for contact-rich tasks, focusing on common manufacturing tasks such as bolt-nut assembly/disassembly, peg-hole insertion/separation, and shaft-ring assembly/disassembly. The ability to transfer and augment digital skills for contact-rich tasks will allow automation systems to be implemented on a larger scale, with minimal manual setting and fine-tuning required. STAMAN aims to create transferrable and augmentable digital skills that will underpin the development of mass machine skills for future manufacturing, similar to how industrial robots have contributed to modern mass production.
The proposed research encourages more use of robots in assembly (e.g. automotive, aerospace, electronics, etc.) and disassembly (e.g. repairs, remanufacturing and recycling), and thus directly contributes to the UK’s Made Smarter initiative and the circular economy goals.
Details: UKRI
Past projects
Self-learning robotics for industrial contact-rich tasks (ATARI): enabling smart learning in automated disassembly
Value: £300k from EPSRC and £100k from the University of Birmingham
Duration: 10/2021-09/2023
Affordable and modular robotic disassembly systems (EPSRC IAA )
Value: EPSRC IAA Follow on rate
Duration: 4/2023-11/2023
and medical equipment, involve significant health and safety risks in disassembly (e.g. leakage and explosion), making disassembly expensive and difficult to scale up.
In this project, we aim to significantly reduce the cost of robotic technologies by improving the design of the disassembly robot system to create a general-use low-cost robotic disassembly robot station (e.g. a single robot cell) that can be used for *** and *** – the two major disassembly operations to disassemble common consumer products.
solutions. Being standardised means the proposed robotic disassembly product can be mass-duplicated and mass-produced which will pave the way for scale-up.
Hierarchical use of battery : Intelligent evaluation and collaborative robot disassembly
Value: £*** from JITRI
Duration: 10/2019-10/2022
AMTECAA (Advanced Manufacturing Technologies to Create, Activate & Automate) programme
Value: £10m funded by the European Structural Investment Funds (ESIF)
Duration: 2019-2023
AMTECAA supports SME’s in Birmingham and Solihull. AMTECAA covers six high-impact interrelated technology areas, i.e. additive manufacturing, advanced machining, surface engineering, laser processing, and industrial automation while digital manufacturing (Industry 4.0) is an overreaching enabler for developing new products and processes.
If you’re looking to explore how automation technologies can help you be more productive or provide a competitive edge then please contact us.
Automatic disassembly replanning for autonomous remanufacturing
Value: £12k from the Royal Society and £12k from NSFC
Duration: 03/2019-03/2022
and adapt frequently. Current industrial robotic techniques, most of which designed for repetitive and structured motions in assembly, do not have the required flexibility for disassembly. The project will facilitate autonomous multi-agent model and optimal replanning to deal with unforeseen changes in
robotic disassembly processes. We expect to produce scientific results relevant to researchers in robotics, modelling & simulation, remanufacturing and recycling. The resultant techniques will promote the flexibility and robustness of robotic disassembly systems, and thus encourage a wider adoption of remanufacturing.