The Finnish company Ainak Oy, which specialises in extended reality (XR), found two German research partners for the development of the XR SHIELDS training programme as part of the Cascade Funding Call Master XR. Together with the Technical University of Cologne and Fraunhofer IPT, the nine-month project, which will start in autumn 2025, aims to present an offering that will help skilled workers interact safely and ergonomically with robots in modern factories. Contact with the German partners was established through the NRW.Europa team at ZENIT.

XR-SHIELDS is an XR-based training programme for factory planners or safety engineers who are responsible for designing and managing the shop floor and thus for the health of employees in the context of human-robot collaboration (HRC). The training covers topics such as safety zones, sensors for detecting the presence of people, the visibility of robot actions and ergonomics during HRC. In a virtual environment – such as an assembly line with robots – potential sources of danger, such as poorly visible robot movements or missing safety zones, are to be identified from a catalogue and suitable solutions applied directly. Users receive immediate feedback on how good their decisions were. A particularly practical feature is that the training can be individually adapted to the user's own company. With user-friendly software, real workplaces, robots and processes can be digitally replicated and trained – without any programming knowledge. This makes working with robots safer and more efficient.

Due to the short notice of the call, the collaboration was developed under considerable time pressure: only three weeks remained to bring the parties together. The Finns had searched for cooperation partners via the Enterprise Europe Network database. The NRW.Europa team forwarded the request to the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering at TH Köln, which immediately expressed interest and suggested bringing in Fraunhofer IPT as another research partner with proven technical expertise and project management know-how.

Thanks to the rapid mediation, a joint application was prepared, submitted and approved. The cooperation not only strengthens the innovative power of the partners involved, but also creates international references and applications from which SMEs in the region will benefit in the long term.

Development partners

Fraunhofer IPT, a specialist in production technology, is responsible for project management and the development of XR-SHIELDS. This includes analysing the requirements of the training scenario, translating them into a specification sheet for defining the training scenarios, and designing and creating the training scenario defined in the specification sheet.

TH Köln – Germany's largest university of applied sciences – contributes its expertise from the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering to the project. With a focus on Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and digital security, the university is an ideal partner. In the project, TH Köln is responsible for disseminating and exploiting the results.

Ainak Oy is a Finnish SME specialising in XR technologies and the development of immersive factory environments based on the VIROO platform. The company is responsible for integration into the VIROO platform and is the main party responsible for dissemination and exploitation.


'This project is exciting for us because it gives us the opportunity to integrate cutting-edge topics and technologies into our teaching as part of an international collaboration, enabling us to convey up-to-date and relevant knowledge to our students even more effectively.’ 
Prof. Dr. Eike Permin, TH Köln

'In the course of the development towards human-centred production, human-robot collaboration (HRC) represents a key opportunity to increase productivity, with XR Shields enabling concrete industrial applications to make this collaboration safe.’ Leo Hemmerich, Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT – Research Associate, Production Quality
 

Please watch the visualizing Video  (Link to the Youtube-Kanal of NRW.Europa, .mp4-Video)

Would you like to apply for an exciting Cascade project? We regularly publish current calls for applications:  https://nrweuropa.de/cascadefunding/

Contact to the NRW.Europa-Team: 

ZENIT GmbH / Enterprise Europe Network
für Nordrhein-Westfalen NRW.Europa
Sabrina Wodrich
Mülheim an der Ruhr, Deutschland
Phone: +49 208 30004-44
E-Mail: Sabrina.Wodrich@zenit.eu
Internet: https://nrweuropa.de; https://www.zenit.eu

 
Involved EEN-Partners from Finnland:

Business Finland, Enterprise Europe Network
Ms Maarit Vuorio
Mobile: +358 40 5845 497
Tampere, Finnland
E-Mail: maarit.vuorio@businessfinland.fi
Internet: http://www.businessfinland.fi, www.een.fi, http://een.ec.europa.eu/

Contact to the development partners in Finland and Germany: 

Fraunhofer IPT (DE)
TH Köln (DE)
Ainak Oy (Fi)

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