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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Aseptic Smart (Worldâ€™s first unmanned, fully aseptic multi-functional commercial filling line for the bio-/pharmaceutical industry)

Teaser

Summary

The ASEPTIC SMART project is aimed to develop a novel fully robotized, multifunctional pharmaceutical filling line with capabilities of processing several container types (vials, syringes, cartridges, ampoules, etc.) and thus bringing the sector to the fore of Industry 4.0 revolution, which is the future of manufacturing in Europe.
This ASEPTIC SMART technology enables fast changeovers (30 minutes) thus providing manufacturing flexibility and agility, critical in processing smaller batches of more personalized injectable medicines. Robots eliminate the need for human intervention in aseptic area and thus solve two traditional challenges within the pharma industry: sterility assurance and contamination risk reduction.
All the machines and devices have a modular design which allows cheaper and faster scaling out through addition of more modules where production increase is required and reduces technology transfer costs by 94%.
The technology has the following additional advantages:
- Lower operational costs
- Less parts, reducing maintenance costs and energy consumption
- Compactness, up to 50% smaller size
- Increased process repeatability: robots reduce rejection rates to virtually zero (less than 0.05%)

Work performed

Technical work
- Development of the Aseptic Smart system artificial vision: starting from the definition of hardware components, through a dedicated design of the hardware support structure, we reached the full definition of the controls needed in the system and we are now in the vision system testing phase.
- Development of the overall Aseptic Smart system control architecture: this activity is the core of our project, it is now ongoing, and it will also require the second semester for complete development
- Activities of adaptation of processes to robots just started, and they will require the second semester for complete development and half of the third semester.

Dissemination and commercialization work
- Due to the high innovation of our project, this is strictly confidential, and we are therefore in this phase presenting it to dedicated customers under non-disclosure agreements.
- We are attending international conferences and congresses to disseminate our results, always related to â€œFacility of the futureâ€ topics and robotics filling technologies.

Final results

Aseptic Smart is a revolutionary solution since it is based on the elimination of human intervention in the process area; moreover, changeovers for different formats or for different containers are easier and time to perform them is drastically reduced.
Compactness and exaggerated modular approach are two additional peculiarities of the system.
Pharma Industry is nowadays under a worldwide pressure to improve quality and sterility while reducing costs; moreover, personalized medicine approach is requiring more and more flexibility and lean approach.
Robots are the ideal approach to reach those targets, replacing human beings in accurate and repetitive tasks while raising the technical skills of actual operators, allowing them to grow as process experts.