Disrupting food handling with softness
The food industry still faces a persistent challenge: handling soft and delicate products largely depends on manual labour – repetitive, physically demanding work that puts workers’ occupational health at stake and adds costs across the supply chain.
MOZART addressed this challenge with AUTOMAT: an AI-powered robot built to handle irregular and fragile objects reliably. Working safely alongside people, AUTOMAT aims to make food processing more sustainable and more competitive.
FACING THE HARD CHALLENGES WITH SOFT ROBOTS
Origami-inspired mats, embedded with soft sensors and guided by AI, let AUTOMAT reshape its surface to move fragile objects gently, without ever gripping them.
Innovation and society
Technology alone is not enough. MOZART combined engineering with social sciences and humanities (SSH) research to make automation work for people, and not only for processes. The project’s interdisciplinary team has studied human-robot interaction, the changing nature of food-sector jobs and the usability and sustainability of the technology, sharing these insights on a dedicated blog.
