COLIBRI – Grant awarded

Start date: 2021

End date: 2024

Participants: Leader: Aerotecnic Metallic SL; Consortium members: Applus+ Laboratories (LGAI Technological Center SA), Altran Innovacion SL, Arcelormittal Innovacion Investigacion e Inversion SL, Deuser Tech Group SL, Embention Sistemas Inteligentes SL and Keonn Technologies SL.

Funding: This project is funded by the CDTI and supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación).

Objectives

The aim of the COLIBRI project is to research and develop drones for use in warehouses and industry. This means investigating a collaborative logistics and asset control system for industrial and manufacturing environments, based on the incorporation of a new concept of collaborative, industrial, intelligent and connected drones, able to work together in a productive environment, indoors and with people.

The project’s technical objectives are as follows:

• Implement an intelligent and connected asset search, inventory and traceability system, capable of working collaboratively in an industrial and indoor environment safely alongside humans.
• Reduce time and costs in the inventory or location process. The logistics control system will be fast, versatile and effective in industrial environments, as well as extensible with new functionalities.
• Enable a fleet of intelligent mobile devices to operate continuously, automatically and simultaneously without the need for action by the system operator in accordance with the established prerequisites. In addition, the system will be able to operate in large environments and will be expandable and scalable.
   

The COLIBRI project also responds to the industry's need to hybridize the physical and digital environment by implementing a connection between the real and virtual based on the digitalized logistics control system. This will be done through the interconnection of multiple RFID systems and the development of multi-level digital twins.

The existing certification and validation processes apply to drones for outdoor rather than indoor use. However, the benefits of being able to use drones indoors in a safe way are diverse, especially in terms of logistics and operation of large industrial buildings.

Applus+ Laboratories’ specific main objective in the project is to design and apply a validation framework and new validation methodologies to small, indoor drones for industrial applications. Building on existing methodologies for outdoor drones, this new framework will require the development of specific test benches and test methods adapted to indoor operations.

Methodology

To achieve our goals, we will work in three different directions:

• Research into the ecosystem and how drones can be best designed for safe use in it. This phase will involve the definition and development of test benches and efficient associated methodologies in order to develop an agile validation framework for industrial drones for indoor applications.
• Develop a methodology adapted to the operating conditions in industrial environments. This methodology will be focused on the validation of the safety elements that enable coexistence with the workers with whom the drones will collaborate, the minimization of damage, as well as the correct execution of operations.
• Applying indoor localization, navigation without GNSS, detect and avoid, mapping, geocaging, etc., in order to develop the testing methodology that will allow, on the one hand, to check the functionalities of the drone and, on the other, to lay the foundations of what would be the first drone certification laboratory for industrial use.