Social industrial collaborative environments integrating AI, Big Data, and Robotics for smart manufacturing


The consortium of CONVERGING is pleased to announce the launch of an ambitious joint initiative selected and granted for more than €8M by the European Commission as part of the Horizon Europe Programme.


Recent years have been marked by global-scale occurrences including the economic crisis and an unprecedented pandemic which have provided tremendous challenges on manufacturing firms that had to rethink their production and business models. Under the new reality, reconfiguration has to consider many more dimensions than a simple rescheduling of pending orders. The production system itself needs to adopt both human and automated resources that can work together seamlessly or mutually exchange tasks, allowing the execution of any process plan in more than one, non-predetermined ways.


As a response, CONVERGING aims to develop, deploy, validate and promote smart and reconfigurable production systems including multiple autonomous agents (collaborative robots, AGVs, humans) that are able to act in diverse production environments. The diversifying factors will be a multilevel AI-based cognition (line, station, resource levels) which will exploit the collective perception (digital pipeline) of these resources, allowing them to interact with each other and seamlessly coexist with humans under a "social industrial environment" that ensures trustful, safe and inclusive user experience.


The CONVERGING technological solutions will be applied in 4 industrial Pilots derived from a variety of sectors, namely:

  • Automotive sector – end user FORD
  • White goods sector – end user ELECTROLUX
  • Aeronautics sector – end user IAI
  • Additive manufacturing sector – end user PRIMA

The consortium of CONVERGING consists of 16 partners from 9 countries (Greece, Spain, Italy, Israel, Germany, Luxemburg, Finland, Japan, United Kingdom) who will join forces to develop, deploy, validate and promote smart and reconfigurable production systems within the 4 years duration of the Project.