LIAA Project: Home

Welcome to the LIAA Project

"LIAA aims to keep assembly jobs in Europe by creating and implementing a framework that enables humans and robots to truly work together in assembly tasks."

Example configurations: lean, one or two-armed robot, workplace-sharing System

Announcements

2016-08-29: The LIAA project will be exhibiting the developed technologies and demonstrators at the MOTEK 2016. For more information, click here. To register for the MOTEK, click here.
2016-06-14: The LIAA technology descriptions have been updated. To read, go to "Technology".
2016-05-23: The LIAA publications and presentations can be found here.
2016-05-11: The LIAA project has successfully passed its 2nd review. For more information, click here.
2016-05-03: The presentation of the 3rd Workshop on Hybrid Production Systems at ERF2016 are online here.

Robotics and Lean Production

Robotic systems are still used almost exclusively in high-volume production. Most initiatives started to make the use of robots more attractive for SMEs focused on the intuitive programming of the robot for completely automated solutions or on engineering complex automation solutions to replace human workers.

"There is a definite lack of applying lean approaches towards human-robot-cooperation solutions!"

While available commercial robot solutions are incompatible with lean production principles, LIAA aims at overcoming precisely that by adopting the traditional Japanese lean principle of Jidoka, which translates to “automation with a human touch”; not in its traditional meaning of the human operator controlling the automation, but rather in the meaning of incorporating the human as part of the automation loop.

Pilot Cases

The outcome of the project will be applicable in many market sectors. However, it is not possible to develop working methods and tools for the whole manufacturing spectrum from the get-go. Consequently, the advancement of the project will be mainly driven by the five pilot cases defined by the industrial users' needs. Nevertheless, the method and tool developers will consider generality and openness as critical characteristics of the development, so that the framework may be later on efficiently transferred to other industrial applications. The pilot cases will provide the opportunity for the LIAA framework to be used in a set of real industrial scenarios.

Five very distinct pilot cases from different market sectors, as well as different players in the value-chain are included within LIAA.