The RAMSSES project has the strategic objective to obtain recognition and an established role for advanced materials in the European maritime industry. To achieve this the project will demonstrate the benefits of new materials in thirteen industry led and market driven demonstrator cases along the entire maritime process chain from components through equipment and ship integration to repair. Those demonstrators will reach a high Technology Readiness Level between TRL 6 and 8 and will either be installed on shore under close to reality conditions or validated on board. The technical performance as well as life cycle cost efficiency and environmental impact will be assessed and validated by specific expert teams following common procedures and testing standards. The test program will be based on risk assessment and a widest possible use of existing test results and supervised by rule making bodies, such ensuring relevance for a commercial approval beyond the project. Test data as well as best practice procedures on design, qualification and production of new material solutions will be made available in a maritime test database and a central knowledge repository, thus allowing fast qualification and approval of similar maritime applications in future. RAMSSES also aims to improve the innovation capabilities of the European maritime sector by elaborating terms of reference of a future use of the test database and the knowledge repository beyond the project. In cooperation with other initiatives, it will contribute to the formation of a maritime materials innovation Platform including continuous technology transfer from and to other industry sectors.

Draping is a process that is used for about 30% of all carbon fibre composite parts to place layers of carbon fiber fabric in a mould. During this process the flat fabric distorts to fit to the shape of the mould. Ensuring the accuracy of the draping in terms of position and fiber orientation and avoiding wrinkles is a challenging task. The DrapeBot project aims at human-robot collaborative draping, where the robot assists during the transport of the large material patches and drapes the areas of low curvature, while the human deals with high-curvature regions. To enable an efficient collaboration DrapeBot will develop a gripper system with integrated instrumentation, AI-driven human perception and task planning models and a low-level control structure. All of these developments aim at a smooth and efficient interaction between the human and the robot. Specific emphasis is put on trust and usability, due to the complexity of the task and the size of the robots that are involved. Two different robotic work-cells will be adapted for the use cases in project and will remain available after the end of the project for dissemination to stakeholders. The use cases in the project include the aerospace, automotive and shipbuilding industry. There are about 4000 companies in Europe that use draping processes and a potential of about 20.000 installations of collaborative robotic draping exists. Beyond this market, DrapeBot will have a wider impact on human-robot collaboration, especially in areas where efficiency of the collaboration is relevant.