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Project

Isolator 4.0 - Robotics in isolators in Pharma

Medicine and vaccine filling lines in isolator systems are becoming increasingly important to the pharmaceutical industry. Currently, human interventions in such isolators are performed by means of gloves in glove ports. Consequently, the barrier between an operator and the sterile process is only a glove, which cannot provide full guarantee of sterile integrity. In addition, any intervention by an operator puts the moving parts of a filling line on hold, for operator safety. This induces a loss of capacity of the line. Moreover, the upcoming novel standard on sterile production advocates the use of appropriate technologies such as robotics to further reduce the risk of contamination. This project aims at reducing human contamination in medicine production to zero, by avoiding any human operations with gloves within isolators. Instead, these operations will be performed by robots. Furthermore, the goal is to make these robots as autonomous as possible (80% of all tasks), and only adopt intuitive, tele-operated control by humans for complex and rare operations (20% of all tasks). This requires a complete rethinking of isolator designs.

Date:1 Jan 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Motion planning under constraints, Vision based object and anomaly detection, Task planning, Teleoperated robot manipulator control, Isolator 4.0 prototype design
Disciplines:Motion planning and control, Robot manipulation and interfaces, Sensing, estimation and actuating, Computer vision
Project type:PhD project