OPTIMAI, the H2020 zero defect challenge kicks-off !

On February 3 and 4, 2021, the OPTIMAI project ‘Optimizing Manufacturing Processes through Artificial Intelligence and Virtualization’ held its online kick-off meeting.

This new Research & Innovation Action, funded by the European Commission’s programme HORIZON 2020, is coordinated by CERTH – Centre for research and technology Hellas, one of the largest research centres in Greece. The meeting brought together 15 partners from 8 European countries. The project consortium is formed by a well-balanced group of research organizations, industrial players, SMEs and end-users active in the project.

Kleemann Hella S.A. (Greece), Televes S.A.U. (Spain) and Microsemi Semiconductor Ltd (UK) will be directly and actively involved in in the user evaluation and validation activities in order to maximize the solution developed by OPTIMA in terms of impact and commercial uptake.

Industry is crucial for the European economy. Enabling technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twins (DT) are key drivers for the next generation of industry. Using these technologies, the EU-funded OPTIMAI project will strive to strike an optimal balance between fast, cheap and reliable production choices that have a big impact on the competitiveness of an industry.

Thus, the project will develop smart instrumentation of production for quality inspection and monitoring. Using AI models, collected data will be analysed for the early detection of defects, the identification of upstream deficiencies and the reconfiguration of production parameters. To optimise production planning, the project will virtualise production using digital twins of processes and sensors.

Youbiquo will mainly work on computer vision techniques for operator-machine interaction and on Augmented Reality interface and visual analytics.

The Italian certified innovative SME will design and develop different interactions modules aiming to exploit all the features of the Smart Glass, both electronics and software. For these purposes, Youbiquo will work on the hand gestures recognition using 3D Camera ToF together with other RGB cameras and AI algorithms; moreover, the company will design and develop a Natural Language Understanding module to interact with the AR world.

Youbiquo will manage an efficient AR maintenance use case in which video stream is remotely evaluated and AR information are shown on the Smart Glass optics. Defects or malfunctions of the instrument in front of the operator will be represented in AR, in real-time, in order to improve the maintenance operations.

The project’s factsheet is available at CORDIS: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/958264/it

OPTIMAI is a 3 years project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme. It will conclude in December 2023.