In July 2019, Pierre-Yves Sempere,  co-founder at EMSPROTO took over the vice-presidency Users of Aquitaine Robotics Alliance.

The Aquitaine Robotics Alliance is an affiliation of more than one hundred members which are mainly research companies and training organisations within the Robotics Industry in the Aquitaine region of France. Members can also include the end-users of the Robotics themselves.

The collective main objectives of the Alliance are :

• Structuring the regional robotics industry
• Supporting collaborative R&D projects
• Developing skills in scientific research and training

Pierre Yves Sempere explains why he accepted this new challenge :

« After already being a member for 2 years, I decided to accept the offer to become the vice-president of The Aquitaine Robotics Alliance as it covers all areas of the commercialization and industrialization process. This new position will allow me and EMSPROTO to support the Alliance in its mission to market, rationalize and educate the Aquitaine region on robotics.

EMSPROTO is in demand for robotization, automation, so it is only natural that we are heading to the most important groups in the New Aquitaine region, which is this important group of companies. Very demanding members of the alliance  are in customer-supplier relations, we have allocated a partnership with CogEngines a robotics startup that has great potential. This alliance will strengthen the links between our activity and robotization. It will also allow us to open-up some technological locks that to date remain closed in our electronics manufacturing sector .

The objective of this project is to integrate a robot that is able to learn in real time the tasks to be performed with the least amount of programming possible. Robotization and cobotization are tasks related to our electronic board assembly business. Thanks to this project, we will be able to increase the quality of the tasks and thus maintaining the quality of our services, while assembling more and more technological projects in record time.

This approach fits perfectly into the EMSPROTO DNA : we don’t just assemble electronic boards, we see beyond! This crazy race for progress allows us to remain competitive. Our customers benefit from this through our pricing, lead times and consistent quality. »

Curious to know more, we went to meet Sebastien Lissare CEO / IA & cobotics expertise at Cogengines. 

“I met Pierre-Yves Sempere a few years ago at the Bordeaux Montesquieu technopole and we compared our respective roles. At the time, I was beginning to want to create something artificial. I had the impression that what was being done in the field was very much centered on data processing, big datas, image and sound recognition and that we had completely left aside the interaction with man. So I wanted to create my vision of artificial intelligence in robotics, how I imagined what it should be in complete interaction with humans. In the beginning I started to develop by myself at home in my garage in parallel with my activity. After 3 years of doing this I started to have something that worked so I decided to enhance it. So I founded Cogengines with two other collaborators. We have two branches: a video game branch and a robotics branch and it’s the same technology for both. Today we have powerful algorithms that allow real interaction with the user.

After that I went to see Pierre-Yves Sempere to share with him my vision of the robot, especially the concept of cooperation and not people who will spend several days programming a robot so that it always does the same thing. He was immediately enthusiastic because at EMSPROTO there is a vision of being able to run production lines from start to finish in a fairly digital way.

The idea was to be flexible and adaptable to any demand. We quickly found common ground with EMSPROTO who were looking for versatile robots that could be reprogrammed very quickly. So we started manufacturing a collaborative robot that can be used by a person with no particular technical skills. The tasks can be to lift heavy objects or to do repetitive tasks. »

Today the project is nearing completion. We underline this beautiful experience or how a human encounter gives life to a collaborative robot !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3e95Rz9Igo