Launch of EU granted TraceBOT project: Smart LabAutomation – Traceable Robotic Handling of Sterile Medical Products

Article published on 11th June 2021 on website of BioLAGO - the health network:
The Handling of Sterile Medical ProductsThe handling of sterile medical liquids today is mainly carried out manually.Lab automation with dexterous, reasoning robots and their traceable action isthe solution to this challenge. The EU granted TraceBOT project bringstogether six experts from five countries that will develop the TraceBOT.


Today manual procedures still dominate when it comes to creating and testing newhealthcare products. This is because regulations require certainty in the execution ofeach process step and systematic checking to verify task completion, known astraceability.

A particular challenge in this field is the handling of sterile medicalproducts. Lab automation with dexterous, reasoning robots is the solution. The EU funded TraceBOT project (Grant agreement ID: 101017089) brings together six strong partners from five countries: Astech Projects Limited (England), Commissariat à l‘Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (France), Fundación Tecnalia Research & Innovation(Spain), Invite GmbH (Germany), Technische Universität Wien (Austria) and Universität Bremen (Germany) and is being guided by representatives of the pharmaceutical industry. Each partner contributes its own expertise by providing a solution working hand-in-hand with each other partner’s solution.

The cooperation consists on the development of tactile grippers for handling medical products, a set of manipulation skills to execute the regulatory checking action for every assembly step, an intuitive programming method for a quick adaptation to novel products and tasks and, last not least, a programme which assures reasoning for safe and failure-resistant operation of the robot system to meet the need of safety-critical automation. The objective of TraceBOT is to bring verifiable actions to robot manipulation by reasoning over sensor-actor trails in a traceability framework based on digital-twin technology and extend current robot motion planners by the automatic execution of self-checking procedures that create a semantic trace of the actions performed.

The goal is to create robotic systems able to understand what they perceive and do, to ensure that any manipulation action is verified, thus meeting the needs of the regulated environment. The TraceBOT project’s coordination and dissemination is carried out by the German based health network BioLAGO.
Duration: January 2021 till March 2025.

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