Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) recently announced six new selected projects from its fourth Technology Project Call that took place earlier in 2019. With the selection of these six projects, more than 40% of ARM Members are involved in one or more project. Pending final negotiations, ARM plans to provide more than $2.5M in funding for a total investment of approximately $5.8M across the six projects.
The criteria for selection is based upon ARM’s Technical Investment Strategy, which was defined based upon input from its 200+ member organizations, as well as its funding source, the Department of Defense. The Technical Investment Strategy focuses in 5 key areas, whcih ARM believes will have the biggest impact on moving forward the state of robotics so that they can be more easily deployed in the USA. These areas are as follows:
- Risk Reduction for Transition to the Factory Floor
- Human-Robot Interaction
- Interoperability
- Reconfigurable, Agile, and Flexible Robotic Workcells
- Intelligent Robotic Systems
Every project selected must address one or more of these focus areas.
ARM projects require that at least one industry organization participates on each project to ensure that the outputs are relevant, applicable and impactful. The projects are selected by a team of ARM Members and partners spanning government, industry and academia. ARM does not publicize the number of proposals submitted, but to date to has selected 46 proposals to fund.
