The Project Outline phase of PENTA Call 2 has just closed. 12 proposals approaching €200m of eligible costs and involving 11 countries were received. This demonstrates continuing high levels of demand for innovation along the Electronic Components and Systems value chain. At the same time, as PENTA enters its second year of operation, the first projects from Call 1 will soon be underway. As part of an ongoing series, the AENEAS newsletters will highlight these projects in more detail.
Looking at the results from Calls 1 & 2, the table below illustrates the wide range of strategic challenges addressed by submitted projects. The core focus areas for both PENTA calls; Production Technologies, Health and Automotive, were strongly supported – while the cross cutting supporting capabilities were also well represented. This illustrates the capability of PENTA to cover a wide range of strategic challenges along the Electronics Value Chain.
PENTA Calls 1 & 2 Project Outline Strategic Challenge Areas
CosmoDU (Compact, highly smart, modular drive control unit directly integrated in the electrical motors) is one of the first PENTA projects to start. It addresses the development of next generation drive units for production machines like intelligent industrial robots. The new drive unit will use self-learning capabilities for adjusting and improving its performance at application level (e.g., of the robot) during use in the field. Its communication features will enable the drive unit to exchange data with an external knowledge base, further improving its behaviour and triggering preventive maintenance before a failure occurs.
This 3-year project brings together 14 partners (3 large companies, 8 SMEs and 3 research institutes or universities) across 2 countries, Germany and the Netherlands. The well-balanced consortium covers the whole value chain from the development of new processes and equipment to manufacturing the future drive units and the end-users of the resulting “smart motors”.
The novel CosmoDU approach of integrating so much IT electronics directly into the electric drive – so that health monitoring and drive performance optimisation can be realised, based on self-learning capabilities – will set the trend for the next generation of industrial drives. The core advantages of flexibility, connectivity and system availability will make these drives become key enablers that bring the vision of Industry 4.0 to life. In addition, the CosmoDU approach will be a piloting example for similar efforts in neighbouring domains (e.g., electric-mobility, smart energy, smart infrastructure). It is expected that this will lead to standardisation of key elements of the architecture, the interfaces, and the protocols, thus contributing substantially to the strengthening of the technological leadership position for the partners involved and for Europe as a whole.