AGILEHAND

Why this project?

The food industry has been under pressure for years due to rapidly changing market conditions and increasing variation in consumer needs. These developments have exposed significant limitations in traditional mass production models, forcing companies to operate with greater flexibility, efficiency and agility. The need for systems that can quickly and easily adapt to a wide range of product types and formats is especially growing in product handling and inbound logistics.

Transport systems remain a key technology within the food industry. At the same time, traditional automation is no longer sufficient: increasing product diversity and shorter product life cycles require solutions that are not only efficient but also flexible and reconfigurable in their deployment.
In parallel, the use of robots for automated product handling has seen significant growth. Manufacturers have introduced increasingly accessible, versatile and dexterous robots for applications such as picking, packing and palletising. Despite this progress, handling soft, deformable and non-uniform products—such as foodstuffs—remained a clear technological challenge.

The AGILEHAND project responded to these bottlenecks by focusing on innovative solutions for flexible and robust product handling. The project provided insights and concepts to better tailor robotics and handling technologies to the specific needs of the food industry, with particular attention to dealing with delicate and variable products.

Methodology and results

AGILEHAND was a Horizon Europe project (RIA – Research and Innovation Action) focused on the development and validation of advanced technologies for the autonomous sorting, handling and packaging of soft and deformable products. The project provided an integrated technological framework to enhance the flexibility, agility and reconfigurability of production and logistics systems in European manufacturing industries.
The research approach was structured around three highly integrated technology suites, which together formed the core of the AGILEHAND solution:

1. Smart sensing suite
   Within this suite, advanced sensor systems were developed that are capable of self calibration and of assessing both internal and external quality attributes of delicate products. These technologies enabled reliable product detection and quality evaluation, contributing to improved traceability and more flexible control of production lines, even in the presence of significant product variability.
2. Self adaptive handling, sorting and packaging suite
   This suite focused on the development of robotic and collaborative robotic manipulation systems capable of handling, sorting and packaging a wide range of soft and deformable products without causing product damage. Through adaptive gripper concepts and intelligent control strategies, robots were able to robustly cope with variations in shape, texture and consistency, representing an important step towards wider adoption of robotics in food processing environments.
3. Agile, flexible and rapidly reconfigurable suite
   The third suite comprised AI driven solutions for monitoring, adaptive process control and synchronisation of production and logistics flows within a factory. These technologies allowed production processes to be dynamically adjusted and rapidly reconfigured, even in environments characterised by high product variability and frequent changeovers.

The developed solutions were validated in four industrial pilot cases, each addressing specific products and research challenges:

• Marelec (Belgium): Sorting, batching and packaging of soft, deformable and sticky products such as meat and fish.
• Multiscan (Spain): Sorting and packaging of a wide variety of vegetables with diverse shapes and textures.
• Sant’Orsola (Italy): Sorting and handling of slightly deformable but highly fragile berries.
• Produmar (Portugal): Handling systems for deformable, fatty and slippery fish products.

Through these pilots, AGILEHAND demonstrated that the combined use of advanced sensing, adaptive robotics and intelligent process control provides a robust response to one of the key automation challenges in the food industry: the efficient and reliable handling of delicate, non uniform products in flexible production environments.

Target group

European manufacturers of industrial handling, sorting and packaging systems were the primary target group of the AGILEHAND project. The manufacturing industry (including the food industry), suppliers of production infrastructure, digital technology suppliers, service providers and society at large were also targeted.

Access to the project results

The project was completed in December 2025. Public results from AGILEHAND are available on the project website, covering the different technology suites as well as three online training modules.

These modules address, among others:

• Workers’ skills development:
  Digital transformation is only successful if people evolve along with technology. This course demonstrates how organisations can prepare their teams for new roles in increasingly automated environments, and how collaboration between humans and machines can be strengthened. Participants gain insight into the skills operators need in an AI driven factory, how trust and safety can be reinforced, and why workforce development is a key enabler of sustainable technological transitions. The module focuses on the human, organisational and strategic dimensions of robotics and AI in industrial settings.
• Technical update cours: 
  This course provides a clear and practice oriented overview of the key technologies developed within AGILEHAND. Participants are introduced to the system architecture, the three technological suites (smart sensing, self adaptive handling, and agile reconfiguration), and concrete industrial applications. Through real life use cases, the course illustrates how AI, robotics and digital tools converge in smart, flexible and human centred production systems—fully aligned with the vision of Industry 5.0. The course is particularly relevant for engineers, researchers, students and professionals seeking to understand how these technologies function in practice.
• Standardisation:
  Clear standards and norms are essential for the effective implementation of innovative technologies. This course explains how standardisation within AGILEHAND contributes to interoperability, safety and scalability, and how it facilitates the integration of robotics, sensors and AI across diverse production environments. Participants gain insight into how standards support the design and validation of AGILEHAND solutions, ensure alignment with European frameworks, and accelerate the broad industrial uptake of flexible and agile automation.

Project partners

This Horizon Europe project was a collaboration between 19 partners from Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Germany and Denmark, as well as two affiliated partners from Japan. The project was coordinated by Università Politecnica delle Marche. In addition to Flanders’ FOOD, Flanders was also represented in this project by Marelec.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101092043. The content of this website reflects only the views of the authors, and the European Union is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.