The activities proceed in line with the time-schedule, including:

• equipments procurement and installation (robot &welding system, Task 2:Robot equipment and components procurement and installation - on progress)
• safety manager prototype (Task 3:Safety Sensors - almost concluded)
• contact-less ARFLEX sensor adaptation (Task 4:Contact-less ARFLEX sensor - on progress)
• Human-robot interface (Task 5 Human-robot interface - on progress)
• paper for CIRP-ICME (Task 8:Dissemination and Exploitation)

The activities proceed in line with the time-schedule, including:

• requirements and test plan definition (Task 1:Application requirements and testing definition - concluded)
• equipments procurement and installation (robot & welding system, Task 2:Robot equipment and components procurement and installation - on progress)
• safety manager programming (Task 3:Safety Sensors - on progress)
• contact-less ARFLEX sensor adaptation (Task 4:Contact-less ARFLEX sensor - on progress)
• project web-site and paper for CIRP-ICME (Task 8:Dissemination and Exploitation - on progress)

FREE addresses the sector of small batch assembly where manual work is still the main manufacturing option since the automated systems are costly and requiring expert staff. The target experiment is the gas metal arc welding in which the robot has to be trained by the observation of a human operator. A Superior Hierarchical Control is under development, able to act as "Safety manager", to perform an “Enhanced Programming by Demonstration” and to achieve a “Flexibility and accuracy  improvement".