CISUTAC will tackle current bottlenecks in the transition to circular textiles and clothing. For scale and significance, we focus on polyester, cotton & cellulosic fibres (together ca. 90% of textile materials) and products from 3 sub-sectors: garments, active goods and workwear. In this way, we will have a representative view on the challenges the textile sector is facing for circular transition. CISUTAC follows a holistic approach covering the technical, sectoral and socio-economic levels. We will provide systemic innovations at these levels and perform 3 pilots to demonstrate their feasibility and value: (i) Repair and disassembly; (ii) Sorting for reuse and recycling; (iii) Circular garments through fibre to fibre recycling and design for circularity. To realise these pilots, we will develop semi-automated workstations, analyse infrastructure and material flow, digitally enhance sorting operations and setup interventions with consumers. After the piloting phase, attention will be on the uptake of the results, by the sector, by the wider stakeholder group as well by the consumers. With (worldwide) leading brands and companies, CSOs, RTOs and EU associations, CISUTAC is truly EU-wide and covers the full novel circular value chain. Through the consortium, and further supported by the Transition Support Group with zz members, CISUTAC is strongly linked to ongoing initiatives allowing synergies and joint activities. This is essential for our implementation but also for leveraging the impact and enabling the shift towards a sustainable EU textiles & clothing, underpinned by circular material flows and supported by the wider stakeholders. CISUTAC will bring significant impact of scale via its innovations on repair, dismantling, sorting and fibre-to-fibre recycling. Realising this impact will lead to a reduction of ca. 975ktonCO2eq yearly and to new business activities and markets that together have a value of ca. €250mio and lead to ca. 1300 FTE, also social economy.

Over the last years, production has been shifted from mass production to customization. The conventional production lines, traditionally focused on one product variant or one family of products do show their limitations to cope with the new needs. Moreover, unprecedented worldwide events, such as the recent pandemic crisis, indicated even more the need for flexible production systems that can rapidly switch production to a totally different one (e.g. automotive manufactures had to produce respirators, facemasks etc.). As a response, MASTERLY aims to develop flexible robotic solutions, constituting of modular grippers combined with state-of-the-art robotic technologies, such as mobile, high and low payload industrial and collaborative robots and smart cranes, enhanced with AI driven advanced control and perception capabilities that will allow them to act autonomously, handling a large variety of parts varying in size, shape and material, while being acceptable by both genders of workforce. The developments will focus around the following 5 pillars: 1) Innovative, efficient and low consumption systems for storage, retrieval, conveying and pick-and-place using a multi-disciplinary approach combining technologies 2) Robust handling devices and systems, with integrated –AI driven- advanced control 3) User-friendly interfaces for robot/machine control and programming 4) Interoperable S/W and H/W interfaces 5) Industrial Pilot Cases for work piece handling in full production line The technologies will be tested for flexibility, efficiency & user acceptance in three use cases from different productions sectors, aiming to demonstrate production line and cross sector applicability and adaptability: Elevators manufacturing, focusing on the assembly of electrical cabinets of lifts (KLEEMANN), Sportswear, focusing on warehouse logistics and packaging (DECATHLON) and Aeronautics production, focusing on production of large composite panels of aircraft wings (AERNNOVA).

RENEE envisions flexible remanufacturing using AI and advanced robotics for circular value chains in EU industry. The objective of RENEE is to implement human-centric production systems relying on advanced robotics and AI to accommodate the remanufacturing of diverse states of used products. Additionally, RENEE will accelerate the workforce upskilling/reskilling by deploying a remanufacturing educational platform and a set of operator support technologies. RENEE follows a holistic approach providing product, process and resource-level enablers for remanufacturing applications including: - Circular value chains configuration toolbox: Including software solutions for product state diagnosis and classification, methods for product ‘design for remanufacturability’, Digital Product Passport, and for remanufacturing value chain configuration and planning. - Digital infrastructure for remanufacturing management: including a) tools for the planning and orchestration of flexible remanufacturing systems, b) deployment of Digital Twins customized for the remanufacturing process, and c) tools to enable product traceability and efficient management of the remanufacturing supplier network. - Robot skills & flexible production modules for remanufacturing: Enabling the resource level autonomy for remanufacturing through the deployment of dedicated robot skills libraries, AI methods for decision-support and process optimization as well as advanced robotics integrated in hybrid production specialized in remanufacturing, - Upskilling/reskilling the workforce for remanufacturing: Supporting operators both during the remanufacturing tasks via inclusive interfaces as well as providing the infrastructure (Educational platform) and required material (courses) for training them to meet the requirements of diversified remanufacturing operations. The RENEE modules will be validated in 4 pilots from the household appliances (refrigerators), robotics, and mobility (electrical motors and bikes) sectors

SOFTMANBOT is an industrial-end-user driven project that will provide an innovative and holistic robotic system for the handling of flexible and deformable materials within labour-intensive production processes. The robotic system will be composed by three main pillars including a generic robotic perception system (perception of the product and the human operator), a multi-sensor control and planning platform (advanced control algorithms for shape and contact servoing, AI based task generalization) and smart dexterous grippers (smart mechanical design which will embody grasping/manipulation skills and integrate sensors – mainly tactile – for identifying precisely the contact state between the product and the gripper) able to handle soft components with high-levels of robustness and flexibility. The automation solution is aimed to work in close collaboration with human operators in order to help them in the execution of contact-based challenging tasks so that the productivity and job quality will be boosted which will highly contribute to bring back production to Europe. Special attention will be paid to the integration of novel robotic concepts based on aspects of safety, ergonomics, adaptability, acceptance and user experience. In order to facilitate the assessment of the performance, transferability, scalability and large scale deployment of these solutions, the demonstrations will be conducted under real industrially relevant environments in four pilot demonstrators involving four key manufacturing sectors – toy, textile, footwear and tyre –. The project is not just aiming at quantitative improvements brought by cutting-edge technologies in a specific sector, but to use technology innovation to support a change of paradigm where handling of soft materials with the involvement of robots become a feasible and widespread alternative for European factories, specially SMEs.