How will W2W project remove physical impurities from wood waste derived from construction, demolition, and furniture sectors to reduce overall waste?
A heuristic answer? Human-robot collaboration or Cobots in the project!
But there are more layers to this mutual collaboration, which our project specialists from I-SENSEGroup/ICCS addressed at the Innovent Forum 2025, a two-day engagement event between 14-15 February on innovative technological solutions beneficial to society.
The Innovent Forum is a dynamic hybrid event dedicated to the intersection of science and technology, with the intention to display and promote innovative technological solutions that benefit humanity, fostering networking and collaboration among participants.
This year’s forum targets a diverse audience, including business executives, entrepreneurs, startup leaders, professionals, developers, academics, public sector representatives and policymakers, all of which are crucial to Wood2Wood project. The event focused on several key sectors, including agri-food, energy, and the environment, as well as important technologies such as IoT, Digital Twins, AI, and Extended Reality (XR).
This event was a strategic opportunity to showcase our project and its developments, exchange ideas and also identify potential synergies with other similar initiatives and projects.
The team showcased five state-of-the-art demos, demonstrating how innovation contributes to sustainability:
✅ Human-Robot Collaboration to enhance productivity and efficiency (Wood2Wood Project & Theseus Hub4Circularity demos).
✅ Sustainable Food Behaviors, leveraging advanced insights (ChoiceEU demo).
✅ XR for Agri-Food, optimizing supply chains and promoting sustainable practices (RURBANIVE Project EU demo).
✅ AR for Underwater Cultural Heritage, bringing unseen monuments closer to the public (THETIDA demo).
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The first day kicked off with great energy, engaging discussions, and strong interest in our innovations! Many visitors stopped by our booth to explore our innovative applications in augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and sustainable solutions.
Within the scope of the Wood2Wood project, human-robot collaboration is used to decrease waste due to physical impurities. This unique collaboration has two advantages of utilising dexterity of human workers and endurance of collaborative robots to increase effectiveness and efficiency of removing impurities from contaminated wood. And there is a third element, Mixed Reality (MR) techniques as well that we will explain below.
Also Read: How we explained W2W project to kids at Researchers’ Night
Why Human-Robot collaboration is essential
Traditional waste separation struggles with persistent physical impurities in construction and demolition wood waste (CDW)—nails, screws, and plastics often bypass standard sorting methods.
🔹 Robots alone lack the adaptability to handle diverse and irregular waste materials due to their sizes and geometries of waste particles. But also, robots might lack the capacity to understand variety of disassembly tasks.
🔹 Humans bring dexterity and problem-solving skills but face efficiency and safety limitations.
The Solution?
Human-Robot Collaboration powered by Mixed Reality (MR). MR enhances coordination between humans and robots, allowing robots to handle repetitive tasks while humans tackle complex disassembly, creating a more efficient, precise, and scalable waste recovery process. Essentially, MR offers an interface that can simplify the collaboration between operators and robots.
Watched our Use Cases videos yet?
But how does it work in the project?
Based on the vision input provided by the workpiece, an automated task coordinator assigns workload into tasks meant specifically either for the robots or the human workers. With the support of user-friendly and intuitive interface communication, Mixed Reality can improve the accuracy-to-time ratio and reduce the workload by specifying to humans the tasks that cobots are either not programmed to perform or have the advanced capacities to do so.