Solvay is a Belgian multinational chemical company established in 1863. Following its integration with Rhodia, the Committee of Executive Members at Solvay reorganised its various business units into five segments – Consumer Chemicals, Advanced Materials, Performance Chemicals, Functional Polymers and Corporate & Business Services
Since 2020, we have developed a long term collaboration with the chemical company Solvay in order to help them in the digitalization and robotization of their productions. Our interlocutors are researchers of their Laboratory Of the Future (LOF) on the theme of collaborative robotics, seen as an important way to assist their operators and secure their potentially dangerous actions. The first objective is to develop a cobotic solution to follow an operators’ work step by step by proposing an assistance available at the user’s request in a constrained environment. This project has led to a bilateral contract and to the participation in the ANR Pacbot. In addition, in 2021, we are participating in the ”Miels project” in order to cobotize a handling task for the mixing of chemicals that requires human gestural expertise. The difficulty is first to learn from the human and then to synthesize this expertise.
There are currently two ongoing project:
- Miels Project : The main objective is to develop innovative strategies to characterize and develop neoteric, non-toxic solvents through strategies that will enable to grasp the enormous quantity of required experimental tests all in insuring an absolute safety of the manipulator.
- Glovebox project: Technicians at LOF handle chemicals elements that needs to be contained in specific environment. To that extent they use glove boxes. The space inside these boxes is constrained and manipulation of objects is not always practicle. To that extent, they want to introduce robots inside the glove boxes to assist the lab technician. A postdoctoral student, Lucas Joseph, has been recruited to build a demonstrator of such technology.
People involved:
Related topics #solvay
The aim of this project is to use pieces of softwares developed at Auctus to manipulate LEGO. This work can be related to experiments for Benjamin Camblor.
Live demonstration Here is a video of a manipulation demo. The robot realizes three tasks:
Remove a single LEGO on a tower Put LEGO on the plate Put LEGO on another LEGO All this work is done using the softwares developed at Auctus, namely :
panda_qp_control with velocity_qp and script from panda_lego_exp world_camera_manipulation …
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The glovebox project started the 1st of August 2021 and lasted one year. During this year we developped a demonstrator for a robot assisted glovebox.
Live demonstration Here is a video of the demonstrator in action. The robot realises three tasks:
Bring unreachable tools/vials Serve as a 3rd arm to hold tools/vials Bring preparation to some device All this work is done using the softwares developped at Auctus, namely :
panda_qp_control with velocity_qp moveit_trajectory_interface …
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PhD title: Shared Situational Awareness for task planning between a human and a robot
Abstract: One of the challenges of the future factory is to preserve the health and comfort of operators while improving their productivity. Collaborative robotics (Colgate 1996) is a solution that allows, through appropriate assistance, to focus the operator on the tasks of which he has the expertise, while delegating loads and constraints to an intelligent tool. However, the distribution of tasks between …
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