by Virna Bottarelli |
The full name is Advanced Robotics and enabling digital Technologies & Systems 4.0, but to most people it is known as ARTES 4.0. ARTES 4.0. ARTES 4.0 is one of the eight Italian Competence Centres set up in 2018, but already envisaged in 2016 by the Industry 4.0 Plan, which brings together university partners, research institutes, highly qualified training institutes, foundations, third sector organisations, non-profit companies and organisations, associations and innovative companies with the aim of providing companies with technologies and services that are functional to their innovation process.
"The ARTES scheme is to make available to client companies a powerful firepower, made up of excellent research institutions and 95 industrial partners with the ability to provide wide-ranging innovation solutions," says Professor Paolo Dario, of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisawho is ARTES 4.0's scientific director and interim executive director .
From Livorno, Paolo Dario graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pisa in the 1970s. Full Professor of Biomedical Robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, he is pro-rector of the School and of the Pontedera campus of the same name. He is considered the father of biorobotics: at the end of the 1980s, he organised, together with other luminaries in the field, one of the first conferences dedicated to the subject. In 2017, he received the Ras Pioneer Award from the Ieee Robotics & Automation Society, the most prestigious award in the world in the field of robotics and automation.
ARTES 4.0 is a good example of a public-private partnership. How do two worlds that traditionally have very different operating logics manage to work well together?
When there is a common goal, you find ways to work on the elements that unite. For my part, I have always tried to explore all possible avenues for fruitful collaboration, including overcoming the rigid distinction between public and private. I have more than forty years of experience in the field of research and I have seen our country change: in the 1970s, when I started, the worlds of university research and business were totally separate. In the 1970s, when I started out, the world of university research and that of business were totally separate. Those were years when barriers were being raised and university research itself was of high quality but still very provincial, with no contact with foreign countries, and very few people spoke English. I didn't let it get me down, though. I have always chosen to accept the challenge of our country, which I believe has great potential. It is undeniable that we have made great strides in recent decades.
What are the main activities carried out by ARTES 4.0?
Our three pillars are information, training and innovation. The first step is to inform companies, to make them aware that they can access technologies that meet their needs. Lately we have been offering a series of thematic webinars that have reached an audience of 5,000 users. We also provide training at our hub in Pontedera, a short walk from Piaggio's headquarters. More generally, we are focused on listening to companies, which is essential if we are to develop innovation projects with them. The aim is to use the most advanced knowledge and technologies in our laboratories, raising their level of technological maturity so that companies can benefit from them. And then we work locally, because technology transfer works best if there is proximity between the technology centre and the company. In addition to our offices in Tuscany, we have laboratories, nodes and pilot lines in Umbria, Marche, Liguria, Lazio, Sardinia and Sicily. We follow the 'Test Before Invest' approach, i.e. we provide companies with advanced lines, giving them the opportunity to test and assess whether the results obtained reflect their objectives and then decide whether or not to invest.
Your presence spread over several regions is a peculiarity of yours: how wide are the territorial gaps in our country?
There are certainly gaps. But we decided to accept the challenge: we could have focused on regions that are already very advanced in terms of manufacturing, but we preferred to differentiate ourselves and also work in geographical areas with a lower level of development, whose businesses, however, have great potential and require services that are useful for the digital transition. Our aim is to provide a service to the country by offering our expertise and listening to the needs of companies, in order to work alongside them, without imposing our choices "from above". And the results are there: in Sicily, for example, we have established excellent relations with government departments, and created local networks that include universities and businesses; or, in the Marche and Umbria, we work with excellent businesses that have made the quality of the finished product their strong point. To date, we are the Competence Centre that has received the highest number of proposals for innovation: 330 requests have been made by companies, demonstrating that our approach to regions 'in search' of development works and catalyses the desire to innovate, which is not lacking in our country, even if it is often held back by investors' fears. Our role is also to act as guarantor of a feasible innovation, precisely because we have the necessary skills to develop it and because the evaluation of projects is carried out in ARTES 4.0 by carefully selected professionals.
However, do you think that Italy is lagging behind other European countries in terms of technological innovation?
Italian companies today have understood the value of innovation and are competitive, they are able to win supply contracts almost all over the world, because we are at the top in terms of quality manufacturing. There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are more aware of the value of innovation, and who have gained more in-depth training and international experience. In manufacturing, robotics and mechatronics, we really are the best in the world, because we have undisputed know-how in building everything from machine tools to finished products. And we also have one of the best schools in the world: this is demonstrated by the fact that our graduates are in great demand abroad. There are, however, some shortcomings, which concern Italy and the European system as a whole, and are inherent in Artificial Intelligence, telecommunications networks and software. There are peaks of excellence in AI, but the real centres of innovation are not in Europe, just as the major telecommunications players and the major producers of computers and mobile phones are not in Europe, with all that this entails in terms of managing the data circulating on the network and the overwhelming power of American and Chinese big tech. And yet, the construction of hardware is one of the cornerstones of our industry. As STMicroelectronics, a world leader and one of the key industrial partners in ARTES 4.0, demonstrates in the field of microelectronic components and Mems.
The focus of ARTES 4.0 is on advanced robotics, a subject you are very familiar with, having received the Ras Pioneer Award, the world's most prestigious award in the field of robotics and automation...
Robotics is the defining technology of our Competence Centre. I am talking about robotics in the broadest sense of the term, because we do not only deal with the robotic arm but also with the technologies that enable its integration: control, communication systems, intelligence, telemetry, components, vision systems, augmented reality and simulation. Today we are witnessing a real explosion in collaborative robotics, which is growing at double digit rates. ARTES 4.0 has created several demonstration platforms in this field, which can be adapted to all sizes of business and all sectors, from agriculture to medicine, precisely because robotics is scalable and can be of great help even to small companies that make traditional products for which precision automation can be used to improve product quality, with a view to efficiency but also to total safety.
So work also to ensure that the most advanced technology fits into the context and enhances it, without distorting it...
We could paraphrase a famous politician of the past and say that "technology scares those who do not have it". You cannot separate the use of technology from the human and social context: that is why I believe that a good engineer must also cultivate a humanist side. That's why I believe that a good engineer must also cultivate a humanist side. I have always tried to train engineers who know how to solve the most challenging technological problems, but who know how to fit into the human and environmental context in which we live. Automation and efficiency must go hand in hand with safety at work and, today in particular, with environmental protection, in a technological approach that, as also indicated by the European Commission in its recent document on Industry 5.0, must necessarily be human-centric.
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