Give us some insight into your background and how you came to be involved in DIH².
Honestly, prior to DIH² I knew very little about robotics. I graduated from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca with an undergraduate degree in management and a master’s in human resource management and it wasn’t until I joined Transilvania IT Cluster in 2020 and became the LER that my exposure to all thing’s robotics started.

That must have been quite a steep learning curve?
For sure. During some of the first project meetings, a lot of the technical aspects of the discussions were quite hard to follow, but over the past three years I have learned a lot and during that time I’ve become very passionate about robotics and what we do here at Transilvania IT Cluster.

So, tell us a little about Transilvania IT Cluster.
The cluster was founded back in 2013 to provide innovation, internationalization, technology transfer, and matchmaking support for our initial 20 partners. Today we are an ICT Cluster that looks after the interests of over 150 organizations in North-West Romania. These are software companies as well as both systems and hardware integrators. Our members are start-ups, SMEs, large companies, and the three largest universities in the region. We want to generate added value for our members while also contributing to the development of our regional ecosystem and we see digital technologies not as some distant, promising future, but as a very present and important component of our society today. For us, technology is an enabler that can support and provide modern solutions for other business sectors, public authorities, academia, and society overall and, when we put this all together, we believe that we can all contribute towards increasing the quality of life for our communities at local, regional, national, and European levels. We formally launched a Digital Innovation Hub in 2017 and with a lot of hard work we’ve grown steadily since.

When it comes to agile production, how different are your challenges in Romania compared to other parts of Europe?
Well, let’s start with the fact that Romania ranks at the bottom of the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) within the European Union. There is a very low level of digitized production here with manufacturers lacking both software and hardware infrastructure. Also, much of the workforce is either low-skilled or unskilled, though the lack of skilled workforce isn’t quite the same challenge as it perhaps is in western Europe because for us labour is still relatively cheap and available. Employee reliability is a major pain point for factories though. Clearly no one wants to start in last place, but this does give us a lot of room for improvement and as a DIH we have the opportunity to make a highly visible impact with manufacturers. The TTEs that we worked on are helping us talk with SMEs to show them what is possible, especially if we can bring funding to the table. Quite often, Romanian factories don’t understand how funding works – what the terminology means, or the simple fact that they also need to provide resources from their side. Our role as a DIH therefore is to educate.

You mentioned Transfer Technology Experiments there and obviously one of our tasks in DIH² was to fund 26 TTEs to deliver against our goal of advancing factories through robotics. You supervised two of these – tell us firstly about InnoWest.
We heavily promoted the Open Call through a mix of Robot Days and a matchmaking event. I already knew the technology provider, Inno Robotics, from a previous project that we had been involved with and they brought the manufacturing SME onboard. West Side Production is a metal parts manufacturer located in Satu Mare in Romania that needed to mechanise its welding and polishing processes on the shop floor. They had been struggling to find a reliable supply of skilled welders and more generally wanted to improve their competitiveness, so the InnoWest application was developed to address these challenges by creating a robotic welding solution that delivers increased productivity, traceability and high-quality end products using a single robotic cell.

And has it been successful?
Very much so. The manufacturer has a working solution installed that they are very happy with. At the same time, the technology provider is already talking to potential new clients that are interested in buying the solution. Also, what Inno Robotics learned about production data during the project encouraged them to invest money into developing an AI algorithm from which they are creating a new micro-service to sell to clients. And from our perspective, it has given us a fantastic shop floor use case that will enable us to demonstrate what we can offer as a DIH in the region.

The second TTE was PreBots - what can you say about that?
Composite Industries is a Romanian SME that manufactures carbon fibre products across a wide range of industrial sectors. Carbon fibre is widely used in production of vehicles where it is essential that parts are as light as possible whilst still offering a good strength to weight ratio. These properties have made carbon fibre very popular in aerospace, civil engineering, military, motorsports, and other competition sport, but the lamination process of carbon fibre parts is hard to automatise and so is mostly done manually. Spanish technology partner Canonical Robots developed PreBots to automate this lamination process with the aim of boosting Composite Industries’ productivity. The result here has also been good – the technology partner is now looking to assist Composite with wider automation in the factory and also to bring the solution to market and sell to other potential clients.

Most of our TTEs involved both the technology provider and the manufacturing SME being in the same country, but you have an example of a cross-border partnership here. Do you see greater opportunity for more of this in the future?
I think that the Covid pandemic made it easier to develop trust through virtual meetings in a way that wasn’t possible before but now that’s become much more accepted. Certainly, when it comes to publicly funded projects such as these TTEs I’m quite confident that we will see more of this type of relationship at SME level.

As the Horizon2020 stage of DIH² nears its end, how has Transilvania IT Cluster benefited from being part of it?
For us, the primary benefit has been to expand our know-how. It has allowed us to understand better how other Digital Innovation Hubs operate across Europe with a view to bringing some of those learnings to our ecosystem in Romania. We’ve also built so many connections and created a huge amount of trust with those partner DIHs that I am sure we will continue to cooperate with in the future. Additionally, as I said before those TTE innovation experiments in our region give us concrete examples of what is possible for both technology providers and manufacturers alike.
As a result of DIH² we’ve become more involved in robotics – we better understand the domain and we’ve been able to build out a community based around robotics and Industry 4.0. We really loved the DIH² Robot Days service and adapted the idea behind it to create an Industry 4.0 working group that includes more than 100 companies – both technology providers and manufacturing SMEs – that meet regularly to discuss funding and matchmaking opportunities, and to facilitate know-how transfer between each other. It has also become a launchpad for them to start initiating different collaboration and projects between themselves. And lastly, I’m really proud that we’ve also secured funding as an EDIH which will enable us to expand our range of services in the region. And DIH² is an important part of this success.