I. The Bpifrance i-Lab Innovation Competition
Following MecaBotiX's participation in the i-Lab competition, the robotics company was selected as one of the finalists invited to the final in Paris.
MecaBotiX finalist in the i-Lab competition
The Toulouse startup specializing in mechanics and robotics, MecaBotiX was invited to the awards ceremony for the Innovation Competition for the 2021-2022 period, as well as to a day of conferences organized exclusively for the winners of the innovation contest i-PhD, i-Lab and i-NovThe ceremony was attended by Bruno Bonnel, Secretary General for Investment, accompanied by all the ministers involved in the innovative projects highlighted by the competitions in question.
On that day, MecaBotiX contributed to the event by presenting its innovative solution to the other winners.
Bpifrance's i-Lab Innovation Competition
The 24th edition of the i-Lab Innovation Competition, organized by Bpifrance and funded by the Investment for the Future Program, came to a close on Monday, July 4, with the award ceremony for the winners of the various competitions involved, i-PhD, i-Lab, and i-Nov.
This competition is part of the France 2030 program, through which the French government aims to promote French companies that use innovation to create positive impacts on the environment (decarbonizing the French economy and promoting ecological and energy transition, among other things).
This competition aims to identify promising business creation projects based on innovative technologies and to provide support and financial assistance to the best of them in order to help them develop.
Financial assistance is provided in the form of a grant covering up to €600,000 of the financing requirements, up to a maximum of €1 million.
Eligible expenses under the program include those related to business operations, personnel, equipment, research and development, intellectual property, market and feasibility studies, partner searches, etc.
To make this selection, several criteria are taken into account in order to evaluate innovative projects. Thus, technological, human, legal, intellectual property, commercial, and financial aspects are examined and broken down into several criteria :
- Economic sustainability
- Value creation and growth potential
- The degree of innovation of the technology used
- The social benefits and impacts of the project in terms of sustainable development
- The candidate's ability to manage a company, as well as their motivation and commitment to the project
- Complementarity and composition of the team
- Intellectual property control
II. MecaBotiX finalist in the i-Lab competition
MecaBotiX is a start-up specializing in mechanics and robotics, which develops the M3-Cooper robot for logistics applications: Modular and Cooperative Mobile Manipulator Robots. These robots are bio-inspired by the behavior of ants. They can work alone on simple transport tasks (single robot) or aggregate into clusters of varying sizes (multi-robot), adapting to the task according to its complexity, the required workspace, and the payload to be handled.
The M3Cooper is designed to adapt to existing warehouses, automate and accelerate low value-added tasks (e.g., horizontal and vertical pallet transfer) by relieving operators of tedious tasks that cause musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs).
This allows operators to be reassigned to more complex tasks (checking, order preparation) with higher added value, thereby improving the quality of operators' work in a context of labor shortages in this sector. The M3Cooper is also valuable in avoiding night work or work in refrigerated environments.
The result of research and created in the summer of 2021 by three partners, the Toulouse-based start-up MecaBotix, which specializes in mechanics and robotics, is developing bio-inspired robots modeled on ants, designed to transport loads in warehouses. The first models are expected to be sold to professionals on a B2B basis at the end of 2023 or offered for rent. For the time being, the MecaBotix team is based at La Cité, in the At Home business community, and is developing its prototypes at the Roselab fablab.
In March, she won an european project DIH² (PoRoLog), which led her to design a full-scale prototype, i.e., a human-sized robot (1.80 meters) named M3-Cooper, capable of passing through existing doors, elevators, and pathways by adapting to the warehouse, which will be tested at the end of the year. “Our primary market is small urban warehouses, such as drive-throughs, which are not suitable for forklifts and have very limited space for pallet trucks,” explains Jean-Christophe Fauroux, PhD in mechanical engineering, lecturer, researcher, and president of the company.
The M3-Cooper will be capable of lifting up to 250 kg.
Equipped with a manipulator arm, M3-Cooper will be capable of lifting up to 250 kg at heights ranging from 3 to 15 meters, depending on the version. To confirm its ideas for the design of this robot of the future, MecaBotix consulted with members of the Center for Research on Animal Cognition (CRCA), part of the Center for Integrative Biology in Toulouse (University of Toulouse 3 Paul-Sabatier).
“First, we noted the extreme efficiency of ants, which can lift ten times their own weight,” explains Jean-Christophe Fauroux. Then there's the fact that ants work in parallel: when a large object needs to be brought back to the anthill, several of them work together. This isn't widely used in robotics, where we tend to see ranges: small robots, medium robots, large robots. Our idea was to optimize the basic building block and make it easy to repeat so that it could be adapted to the size of the task.
Finally, tropical ants are able to connect to form bridges several inches long that can carry individuals from one leaf to another. We took from this the concept of extending the workspace, the fact that several individuals connect to each other to go further or to adapt to a task that would be impossible for a single individual".
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