Currently, the use of bio-composites is limited to less critical applications that do not have significant requirements in terms of mechanical performance. However, the use of synthetic composites made from carbon or glass fibre has several difficulties in terms recycling and in terms of dependence on third countries. About 98% of these synthetic composites still end up in landfills and about 80% of the raw materials are currently manufactured outside of Europe. To improve this situation, the project addresses the challenges of using bio-composites for structural parts and aims to increase the range of applications in which bio-composites can be used. This will be achieved by developing an accurate draping process to control fibre orientation, by creating material models that capture the natural variability of the material and by integrating nano-structured, bio-based sensors for load monitoring. Through the increased accuracy and additional control loops in the manufacturing process the consortium expects to achieve predictable properties and constant quality. Within the project use cases from wind energy and boat-building will be investigated, aiming at the manufacturing of a full size rotor blade and a ship hull to demonstrate the technical feasibility and achieving TRL7 for the manufacturing technologies. In addition to the end users, the consortium consists of partners from automation, machine building, measurement technology, material manufacturing and simulation software to cover all aspects of the developments. Based on the predicted growth of the bio-composites market, which is expected to increase by a factor of 2.5 by 2030, the consortium expects a market potential of about 100M€ by 2030.

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.