General Description

The Looming Factory group is an alliance between R&D groups from the university world and industry to facilitate and accelerate the introduction of aligned emerging technologies into the market with the needs and new industrial challenges that result from digital transformation: smart and connected factories, and collaborative robotics in productive environments, demonstrating these technologies in real environments.

Looming Factory is coordinated by the UPC research center on Motion Control and Industrial Applications (MCIA), which is led by researcher Luis Romeral, and which aims to develop and validate in pilot plants the digital production technologies of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by the interconnection of machines and systems and the operational integration of workers with the production environment, as well as by the exchange of information with logistics and distribution systems. In this sense, it will develop four projects that add up to a global investment of 4 million euros:

• Smart Factory: focused on developing advanced monitoring algorithms, with the challenge of working with more complex, large, heterogeneous and interdependent systems, and incorporating aspects such as energy efficiency, environmental impact and security with high resolution, based on the data provided by the new sensors and actuators. Likewise, the project includes increasing the flexibility and adaptation of monitoring and control systems, which must allow the implementation of predictive maintenance strategies and be able to respond in situations of bankruptcy or malfunctioning of industrial plants (health aware control).

• Connected Factory: focused on communication systems. The greatest difficulty with these systems resides in operation with different time scales and several orders of magnitude of the data at different levels, from plant to distribution and trade. The next deployment of 5G networks, the widespread use of new communication protocols in the company and the real implementation of Industrial Ethernet in manufacturing plants with TSN networks, combining the bandwidth of Ethernet computer networks with the times of response of the digital field buses in the industry, are modifying and reducing the difficulties of delays and qualities of industrial communication services.

• Robots on Factory: addresses the use of the workspace by robot arms or mobile robots and their collaboration with workers. This issue includes the design of robots to make them suitable for spaces of small and medium industries, as well as the implementation and learning of forms of movement and navigation that are safe for people. The project includes the study and development of learning tools that must facilitate interaction between people and robots, as well as programming, training or demonstration of cases.

• Factories of the Future: includes the technology demonstrators developed in the previous projects, which will be materialized in the CIM UPC Digital Manufacturing Pilot Plant, both hardware (production demonstrators) for batch and robotic production, and software (collaborative platforms) for data and services.

The Looming Factory actions program is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union within the framework of the Programa Operatiu FEDER de Catalunya 2014-2020 with financial support of 2 M€.