B A S F SEÇMEN AKBAS Seçmen Akbas (Project Lead Innovation in Maintenance) represented BASF within the Smart Tooling project. "At BASF, the Antwerp 4.0 project is ongoing. Innovation and Maintenance is one of the workstreams. We are looking into the possibilities of using robotics and drones for inspection and maintenance. The Smart Tooling project was a perfect match for this". "Dow and BASF are consumers, so they will feel the benefits of robotic solutions. Within this project, we have outlined the problems, indicated the direction and offered testing possibilities together with Dow. But we also learned a lot during the project, thanks to the feedback we always received from the developers. So it was already a win-win situation at that time". "All Smart Tooling subprojects were relevant to us. Quite a lot has been tested with the inspection drones in confined spaces, which carry out wall thickness measurements there. These tests are important in order to to test the new steps in practice. We found working with drones for indoor and outdoor inspections very interesting. The that were found for cleaning are also promising. The goal was not to deliver commercially finished products but prototypes, which can be further commercialised. In order to be able to achieve this, we are still running a number of tests. "We have met a lot of people who are all working on innovation in the processing industry. We will certainly continue to use that network after the project. So that has been a real enrichment". "The relationship with Dow was also very good. As consumers we have the same problems and wishes. We communicated openly and constructively, for the benefit of the developers, and thus also for ourselves. In addition, we enjoyed working with KicMPi. In short, BASF is very satisfied! 53
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