The coordinator of ReconCycle Aleš Ude attended BrIAS Forum on Sustainable Robotic Technologies, held on March 29th, 2024, at VUB in Brussels, Belgium. The aim of the forum was to discuss sustainable robotics technologies ranging from material science, material processing and metal, electronics with sensors and processing, actuators, energy, power and batteries control, and artificial intelligence. Aleš Ude presented the results of ReconCycle in a talk titled Adaptive robotics for the recycling of electronic devices.
The Jožef Stefan Institute Open House is intended for the general public, when JSI welcomes all who are interested in basic and applied research conducted at the institute. The Open House 2024 took place on March 23rd. The ReconCycle workcell for the dismantling of electronic devices was among the exhibits presented to the public. Several hundred visitors came to see the cell and receive further information about the importance of robotics for the recycling of electronic devices.
In the frame of European Robotics Forum in Rimini, Italy, ReconCycle in cooperation with the Imagine project organised a workshop titled Adaptive Robotics for Recycling of Electronic Devices. The workshop included three speakers from ReconCycle, Manuel Catalano (IIT), Mihael Simonič (JSI), and Sebastian Ruiz (University of Göttingen).
Our speakers discussed the technological challenges of automated recycling of electronic devices and how to address them with soft robotics, robot learning, and computer vision technologies. A panel discussion that included experts such as Hannes Fröhlich (Electrocycling) and Tamim Asfour (KIT) was held at the end of the workshop.
ReconCycle countinues to present our results at events across Europe. In March qbrobotics exhibited their work at European Robotics Forum in Rimini, Italy. They showed the grasping and manipulation versatility of qb SoftHand and the Variable Stiffness Gripper for many applications like the electronic waste recycling.
ReconCycle was a technical sponsor of the Robothon competition organized by Technical University of Munich. Inspired by this project, Robothon brings together roboticists from around the world to create robotic manipulation skills for autonomous handling of electronic waste. The teams were given four weeks to solve a specially designed task board, which includes operations typical for electronic waste recycling. It is worth to mention that prof. Ude (the lead of the ReconCycle project consortium) was part of jury committee in 2023.
The award ceremony was held on June 29th, 2023, at the automatica trade fair in Munich, Germany. Congratulations to the winner, team RoboPig from Technical University of Applied Sciences, Würzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany.
Adaptive Intelligent Robots with Soft Hands: Methods and Experiments
The goal of this summer school is to transfer advanced robotics and computer vision knowledge to graduate students and younger postdocs with a focus on modern adaptive methods. These methods will be from AI (network learning), but also from different fields of robotics including adaptive control as well as the introduction of modern, highly adaptive robotic hands to teach participants about the mechanical as well as control- and cognitive-related power of adaptation in computer vision and robotics.
As target application two talks from expert from the recycling industry will be incorporated into this school, which is a field where adaptive methods are highly needed for advanced “green” automation.
The format of this school will be lectures by experts and discussion as well as experimental work, where one day during this school students will perform experiments on a set of computer vision as well as robotics platforms. We also include a poster session and 11 student talks, selected on the grounds of their abstract (to be submitted on registration), where students can present their work, too.
Join us for ReconCycle Summer School 2023 in Mallorca, October 23-26!
The ReconCycle partner, qbrobotics, has developed an application that allows one qb SoftClaw and one qb SoftHand2 Research to work together in disassembling certain electronic components.
Industrial development of this application will be presented in booth F45, Hall 30 at MECSPE 2023, the international reference fair for the Manufacturing industry, which will be held March 29-31, 2023 at BolognaFiere in Bologna, Italy.
No sensors or vision systems were required to perform this task, only the mechanical intelligence of the device.
European Robotics Forum (ERF 2023) was held in Odense, Denmark from March 14th to 16th 2023.
At the conference, the Trinity project organized a workshop entitled “Feasibility Of Agile Manufacturing, What Really Moves SMEs“. The coordinator of the ReconCycle project Aleš Ude presented the results of ReconCycle at the workshop.
The results of the project Reconcycle, regarding the reconfiguration of recyclicng workcells, will be presented at Trade fair for automation, mechatronics, sensor technology, measurement technologies (IFAM 2023), Ljubljana, Slovenia from March 7th to March 9th 2023.
The approach developed during in Reconcycle project were illustrated in Automatica fair in Munich. This was presented in AI.Society booth at the premises of Messe München from June 21-24, 2022. were our institute, MIRMI/TUM illustrated the inspiring vision of tomorrow’s society and its intelligent machines, along with the future of Health, Work, Mobility and Environment by showing visible, touchable and presentable projects.
