VASTERAS, Sweden—Although robots have successfully tackled a variety of manufacturing tasks, many assembly applications still suffer from complex, time-consuming programming. A European Union funded initiative hopes to change that by enabling a nonexpert user to integrate a new manual assembly task on a collaborative robot in less than a day.
The goal of the SARAFun project is to empower industrial robots with perception, learning and reasoning abilities that will dramatically increase production speed, while taking on tedious assembly line jobs.