We acquired a new European project, SOPHIA, which is very important for Hidria. It is the first international project in robotics for our Corporation. Robots and the control of robots became a permanent topic for us in the recent years. On this project we will work together with an exceptionally strong scientific development team from leading European institutions from this area.

The representatives from Hidria’s development office and the Hidria Lamtec business unit who acquired this important European project with their cooperation, already attended the first meeting of the SOPHIA consortium. Apart from Hidria this consortium has 11 international partners. It is led by the Italian robotics institute – Instituto Italiano di Technologia (IIT). In this project Hidria will develop and test new ergonomic solutions for physically straining tasks.

For this project, our Corporation registered two cases we face: the evacuation and selection of stator and rotor laminations from the stamping machine and the work process of package manipulations on the muffle furnace. The partners will test and propose solutions in collaborative robotics and robot skeletons that would be suitable for the production specifics of the Hidria.

In addition to the established development partners with which Hidria will work together on this project, such as the mentioned IIT and the Italian Universita di Pisa, French Universite de Montpellier, Belgian Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Universiteit Twente from the Netherlands and Italian and German institutes for safety at work INAIL and BauA, we will follow the development of solutions for other industrial partners with great interest.

In the scope of the project, we will for example follow the development of the solution for Volkswagen for the production of the new electric model ID.3. Hidria wishes that SOPHIA would become a pilot case of ergonomic workplace optimisation using advanced robotic solutions for our entire Corporation.