Meetup: AI-driven flexibility for industrial robotics

Exploring the limits and possibilities of flexible robotics for modern manufacturing. How can robots deal with changing products, smaller production batches and unpredictable production environments? And what can the latest developments in AI mean for automation in the food industry? Join us for the AI @AP Meetup, organised within the research project Affordable Robot Intelligence for Small Enterprises (ARISE). During this evening, robotics researchers Francis Wyffels and Andreas Verleysen (Ghent University and imec) will explore how advances in AI are making robots more flexible and adaptable to real-world production environments. Discover where traditional automation reaches its limits, which emerging AI technologies show promise, and how to evaluate the possibilities of flexible robotics for your own production challenges. After the lecture, join us for drinks and bites! Meet researchers, food industry professionals and robotics companies in an informal setting. An opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss automation challenges and explore potential collaborations. About the lecture: How much variety can a robot handle? A practical map for the factory floor. Robots in factories thrive where nothing changes: the same part, the same spot, the same motion. The moment products vary, parts arrive mixed, or the robot has to move between stations, automation stalls, and every supplier promises that its newest technology closes the gap. In this talk, we give you a framework to think about those promises: a simple way to size up how much variety a robot job really asks for, and to place any new technology against it, from vision-language-action models and agentic robots that plan their own work to humanoids and mobile manipulators. We illustrate it with robots from our own lab that learn from a demonstration, see what cameras miss and feel what they grasp, and with the questions we ask an industrial partner before a project starts. We close with FIDEX, our imec PROSPECT project on robot fingertips, and how companies take part. Speakers Francis wyffels and Andreas Verleysen lead IDLab-AIRO (airo.ugent.be) at Ghent University and imec together, a robotics group that builds robot helpers: robots that cope with the variety of tasks, objects and places found in factories, laboratories and care. Francis is a professor and a principal investigator in the Flanders AI Research Programme. He leads FIDEX, the imec PROSPECT project on multimodal robot fingertips, and co-founded and chairs Dwengo, whose programmes have reached more than 100,000 students and teachers. Andreas is a Senior Robotics Engineer and Research Lead. He co-leads the group's industry collaborations and brings the lab's robots to the factory floor and into society, from pilot projects with manufacturers to robots for care. About ARISE This meetup is organised within ARISE (Affordable Robot Intelligence for Small Enterprises), a research project involving AP University of Applied Sciences and Arts Antwerp, Ghent University and imec, supported by VLAIO and the Flanders AI Research Programme. ARISE explores how advanced robot intelligence can make flexible automation more accessible and affordable for SMEs.