The handling of sterile medical liquids today is mainly carried out manually. Lab automation with dexterous, reasoning robots and their traceable action is the solution to this challenge. The EU granted TraceBOT project brings together six experts from five countries that will develop the TraceBOT.
Today manual procedures still dominate when it comes to creating and testing new healthcare products. This is because regulations require certainty in the execution of each process step and systematic checking to verify task completion, known as traceability. A particular challenge in this field is the handling of sterile medical products. Lab automation with dexterous, reasoning robots is the solution. The EU funded TraceBOT project (Grant agreement ID: 101017089) brings together six strong partners from five countries: Fundación Tecnalia Research & Innovation (Spain), Commissariat à l‘Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (France), Technische Universitaet Wien (Austria), Universitaet Bremen(Germany), Astech Projects Limited (England) and Invite GmbH (Germany), and guided by representatives of the pharmaceutical industry. Each partner contributes its own expertise by providing a solution working hand-in-hand with each other partner’s solution. The cooperation consists on the development of tactile grippers for handling medical products, a set of manipulation skills to execute the regulatory checking action for every assembly step, an intuitive programming method for a quick adaptation to novel products and tasks and, last not least, a programme which assures reasoning for safe and failure-resistant operation of the robot system to meet the need of safety-critical automation.
The objective of TraceBOT is to bring verifiable actions to robot manipulation by reasoning over sensor-actor trails in a traceability framework based on digital-twin technology and extend current robot motion planners by the automatic execution of self-checking procedures that create a semantic trace of the actions performed. The goal is to create robotic systems able to understand what they perceive and do, to ensure that any manipulation action is verified, thus meeting the needs of the regulated environment. The TraceBOT project’s coordination and dissemination is carried out by the German based health network BioLAGO. Duration: January 2021 till March 2025.
Funded under: H2020-EU.2.1.1.
Overall budget € 6 999 905
EU contribution € 6 999 905