Symposium 2025: Smart Manufacturing

Operator Motivation & Well-being

Human operators remain the beating heart of smart factories. Yet, as manufacturing systems become more complex and the number of skilled people is reducing, supporting their motivation, well-being, and growth is vital.

Flanders Make’s Operator Motivation & Well-being demonstrators show how technology can empower people, rather than overwhelm them. We demonstrate how AI and automation can enhance human skills. We show how immersive eye-tracking technology can be used to measure operator cognitive load with standard XR glasses.

Competency extractor automatically identifies and structures the competencies required to execute tasks in digital work instructions, creating a solid, industry-validated competency framework.

 Competency-Adaptive Digital Work Instructions (DWI) then use this information to generate tailor-made instructions that match each operator’s experience and learning needs.

Our Expert Knowledge Base leverages specialised insights and experience of engineers and technicians who have designed the products or solved similar problems before, captured and made accessible through digital assistants so that even non-experts can use it effectively.

Finally, Competence-Aware Micro Learnings automatically extract short, targeted learning segments, quizzes, videos, and visual guides, directly from work instructions, enabling just-in-time, on-the-job learning.

By merging human expertise with digital intelligence, Smart Manufacturing becomes not only more productive but also more human-centered, creating workplaces where operators feel valued, capable, and connected to the technology around them.

Flexible robotisation

Flexible robotisation is reshaping industries, where automation once seemed impossible. Flanders Make’s Flexible Robotisation demonstrators show how intelligent robotics can adapt to unpredictable environments, complex tasks, and circular production needs in a high mix and low volume framework.

The Robot-Aided Scaffold Assembly demo showcases how mobile robots equipped with sensors, arms, and grippers, like the “Genio” platform, can automatically build scaffolds layer by layer. With built-in navigation, situational awareness, and a digital twin for virtual commissioning, Genio proves that automation can thrive even in dynamic outdoor conditions.

The Smart Electromagnetic Gripper enables flexible metal sheet handling by picking multiple plates from unstructured stacks and separating them precisely one by one, combining efficiency with delicacy.

Meanwhile, Flexible Automated Disassembly demonstrates how robotic intelligence can reverse the production process, disassembling products safely and efficiently to enable material re-use and recycling.

Together, these innovations redefine flexibility in manufacturing, turning automation into a tool for agility, sustainability, and smarter production.

Low scrap manufacturing

Reducing scrap means saving material, energy, and cost, and moving one step closer to sustainable production. Flanders Make’s Low Scrap Manufacturing demonstrators show how data-driven inspection and AI-powered quality control can drastically minimize waste while boosting efficiency.

In the Vegetable Defect Detection without Manual Annotation demo, generative AI automatically creates synthetic training data, reducing the need for labor-intensive manual image annotation. This accelerates the development of inspection systems and improves accuracy.

The Robotic Inspection of Highly Reflective Painted Surfaces demo demonstrates how advanced vision systems can reliably detect flaws that are invisible to traditional inspection tools, even on challenging, glossy materials.

Together, these technologies enable in-process quality monitoring, allowing defects to be caught early, processes to be optimised continuously, and materials to be used more responsibly.

On our Symposium, we demonstrated our RESONANT prototype that can be used for inline quality inspection of complex-shaped parts in high-volume production. It makes a vibrational fingerprint of a part by simply placing it on a custom jig, followed by interpretation with AI and statistical techniques. This approach leads to a fast and reliable pass or fail result within seconds. Smart Manufacturing thus becomes both greener and more cost-effective, turning zero-defect production from ambition into reality.

Digitised production

As manufacturing becomes more complex, data-driven decision-making is essential for efficiency and resilience. Flanders Make’s Digitised Production demonstrators show how digital twins, AI, and intelligent planning tools turn data into actionable insights that make factories smarter, faster, and more adaptable.

The Root-Cause Analysis demo combines expert knowledge from pFMEA with live process data, dramatically speeding up problem-solving and reducing downtime.

The Digital Twin of a Continuous Production Process enables virtual “what-if” testing, allowing engineers to evaluate scenarios and optimize factory performance without interrupting production.

In parallel, Optimal Planning & Scheduling and Resilient Supply Chain Management tools ensure that production remains efficient and flexible, even when conditions change.

Together, these innovations make digitalisation a driver of continuous improvement, empowering manufacturers to predict, adapt, and optimize in real time, creating production systems that learn and evolve with every cycle.