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Almost a million industrial robots are in service worldwide, and their numbers are steadily growing. They perform a vast range of tasks in factories, warehouses and laboratories, and offer a number of advantages to industry, including high throughput and speed, generally better accuracy and improved safety conditions for staff. However, while increasingly common in industry, due to the onerous set-up costs and complexity robots are not widely used in Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs).
Therefore, the more than 228, 000 manufacturing SMEs in the EU - which are seen as a crucial factor in Europe's competitiveness - are typical caught in an "automation trap": they must either opt for current and inappropriate automation solutions or compete on the basis of lowest wages.
To overcome this situation, a new paradigm of affordable and flexible robot automation technology, which meets the requirements of SMEs, is called for, and some of Europe's leading research institutes, universities and automation technology companies, including ABB and Kuka, are planning to deliver this.
SMErobot is an Integrated Project within the 6th Framework Programme of the EC. Its aim is to create a new family of SME-suitable robots and to exploit their potentials for competitive SME manufacturing. These robots will be modular to ensure a wide scope of applications, be it for processing wood, metal or ceramics, or for drilling, sawing or lifting. But, whether SMEs make use of the robots or not will be driven by more than function: it will also depend on cost. Therefore the aim is that they should not cost more than one-third of the...