Research Center of Smart Industry and Robotics
The activities of the Research Center of Smart Industry and Robotics are following: production technologies and production optimization; preventive maintenance; industrial robotics and automation; virtual and augmented reality for industry; self-driving vehicles and autonomous systems; product development and optimization; 3D printing (SLA, SLM) and 3D scanning.
We use software RoboDK in our teaching and training purposes. The additional information about the software can be found from the RoboDK website: https://robodk.com/
The research center includes various laboratories providing the following services:
Flexible Manufacturing and Robotics Demo Centre.
The Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) includes an automated storage system, a mobile robot and a CNC (numerically controlled) lathe with an industrial robot serving it. The system is running on the FESTO Didactic solution and is based on the Industry 4.0 and flexible manufacturing concept. The FMS is used at the university to introduce the Industry 4.0 concept to students and companies. Here you can see how the system starts to fulfill the order with the push of a button, during which the mobile robot takes the product from the warehouse system and takes it to the CNC lathe for processing. The machined part is stored into an automated storage system with a mobile robot when the CNC lathe has manufactured the product. The system works as long as the entire order is fulfilled. The CNC lathe also features a real-time monitoring system for industrial machinery, which is being developed at the institute. The monitoring system shows how long the machine has been running, how many products have been manufactured, which downtimes have occurred, the set limit values are monitored, etc. In addition to the FMS, the robotics demo center also has an ABB industrial robot with a 3D Nikon scanner and a Yaskawa industrial robot with interchangeable tools. Robots are used to teach the implementation and programming of industrial robots to students and company employees. Companies can test their automation solutions with these robots. Students can develop instruments for robots and test their suitability and functionality.
Self-driving Vehicles and Autonomous Systems Competence Center.
The research group is working on research, development, and implementation of autonomous vehicles, industrial mobile robotics, and smart city testbed. In particular, we work on autonomous driving technologies for self-driving vehicles, simulations and validations in terms of safety, usability and edge case detection, mapping and virtual environment creation based on LIDAR and camera data from UAVs, smart city testbed development and user experiments in the future urban environment.
The main research and development topics are: localization and mission planning, motion parameters and route tracking, object detection and avoidance, sensor integration and simulations, and in-depth learning methods by using artificial intelligence based on big data. The broader vision and goal of autonomous vehicle development is to create a smart urban space and intelligent transport environment, where innovative services and functionality can be developed and tested, including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication solutions. In the long term, the aim is to create a research and education test platform that will allow experiments in the field of in-vehicle and all other network V2X communications.
The development of the Laboratory and procurement of sensory have been supported by the HITSA IT Academy program.
Industrial Virtual and Augmented Reality lab ( I.V.A.R ).
The lab consists of virtual and augmented reality devices with a high 3D application processing capabilities, such as HTC Vive, Vuzix M300, Meta2. These devices are used to create and to test virtual and augmented reality for industrial applications, such as augmented reality to perform industry monitoring and simulation in virtual reality. Industrial Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) laboratory is a part of the “Flexible Manufacturing and Robotics Demo Centre”. TalTech IVAR Laboratory studies Virtual and Augmented reality technologies and their respective applications in revolutionizing industrial workflow.
