In this series of articles we take a deeper look into the activity of iQonic project partners.

An opportunity to understand and review the competences and excellences gathered by iQonic.

What is the core activity of your company and which technology is mainly developed in the iQonic project?

Sensap’s main activity with our partners and the technology providers collaboration involved in iQonic project, is the provision of data acquired automatically. The Automatic Data Acquisition system will be implemented/installed in the Use Cases of the project.

The automatic data collection besides the actual involved sensors utilizes latest technologies supporting IIoT ecosystem allowing different machines/processes and computing nodes to interact by exchanging data.

This is achieved through the development of a low-level edge device (Daedalus) that acquires data, processes, and transforms them based on a canonical data model. This is orchestrated by a set of services running on the edge, offering low latencies but also the dynamicity of creating/controlling the data flows among endpoints (data producers/consumers) in safe/secure and on-demand principle. One of the main issues that opto-electronics industry is currently facing, in terms of data, is the diversity in machines and production phases – usually in different locations – that are part of the production chain of an opto-electronic device. The automatic data collection system’s target is to monitor the whole process but also expose the relative data, allowing state of the art algorithms for defect prediction and overall quality grading to be achieved.

The automatic data collection system was developed and continues to improve addressing issues and bottlenecks within the opto-electronic industry. The advices and suggestions of the great network of experts (Fraunhofer, HiLase, Alpes, Filar Optomaterials and Prima Electro) within iQonic consortium and the experience of the technological providers (Core Innovation, Atlantis) contribute to this development.

Which activities have you carried out in the iQonic project?

SENSAP is a SME company whose core activities is the production of data acquisition systems for production line monitoring (PLM) and product quality control. SENSAP’s has profound experience in the development of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), manufacturing solutions and components that allow for data acquisition from the shopfloor, with emphasis on paper and packaging manufacturing business. The involved sector in the iQonic project is the IIoT and Machine Vision R&D unit. The main activities within this unit is the development of the data acquisition system for production lines and machine vision solutions for quality control.

With which partner did you collaborate the most?

Through T4.1 we have collaborate mostly with Holonix, which is offering the i-Like Machine platform – an industrial IoT platform for fleet management, diagnostic and analytics of industrial assets and enabling monitoring. In addition, as we implement the data-connectors for each of the field devices utilized in iQonic, we would like to acknowledge the support and effort by our partners in this task, namely SACMI (Electronic “nose”), FORTH (adaptive optics), Shadow Robot (dexterous hand) and last but not least FiconTec for insights of opto-electronic assembly control system.

What do you expect from the iQonic project?

The iQonic project will progress further our data acquisition unit, Daedalus, adding new functionalities, reaching to a “plug and work” state, fulfilling industry 4.0 criteria – guideline 2019. This will lead to an easier adaptation of our system to different production lines.

Furthermore, the new functionalities developed for iQonic will equip us with an improved data acquisition unit targeting new vertical solutions in manufacturing, giving us the opportunity to enter the expanding market of optoelectronics manufacturing.