Vulcanexus supports KIRO in bringing intuitive robotic tool delivery to smart manufacturing

Within the European ARISE project, KIRO demonstrates how Vulcanexus and eProsima middleware technologies can support real industrial Human-Robot Interaction, helping mobile robots assist workers safely, naturally, and efficiently on the factory floor.

 ARISE is a European initiative focused on making industrial Human-Robot Interaction more accessible, cost-effective, and trustworthy for sectors such as healthcare, intra-logistics, and manufacturing. Through its FSTP experiments, different projects are developing practical use cases that explore how open middleware, reusable robotics components, and human-centric design can accelerate the adoption of advanced automation in Europe.

One of these projects is KIRO: Key Intelligent & Interactive Robotic Operator, a project focused on improving manufacturing efficiency and worker safety through AI-driven, voice-enabled robotic assistance.

What is KIRO about?

KIRO addresses a common challenge in high-mix, low-volume manufacturing: workers often need to handle many different tools while performing complex assembly tasks. Searching for, collecting, and transferring those tools can interrupt workflows, increase physical effort, and reduce the time operators spend on high-value activities.

Developed by iKnowHow, iLink Nees Technologies and Athena Research Center, KIRO introduces a mobile robotic assistant capable of retrieving and delivering tools on demand. Workers can request a tool through a mobile or voice interface, while the robotic system interprets the request, checks availability, navigates through the production environment, identifies the correct tool, and delivers it either to a workstation or directly to the worker.

The project combines several technologies to make this interaction natural and safe: voice-based requests powered by AI, UWB-based positioning, computer vision for tool recognition, autonomous navigation, dynamic safety zones, close-proximity handover and other modules which need to efficiently communicate between each other.

How Vulcanexus fits into KIRO

KIRO uses Vulcanexus Jazzy as part of its ROS 2 deployment environment, providing a DDS-native foundation for communication between the robot, mission controller, perception modules, AI interaction layer, and monitoring components.

Through the eProsima DDS Enabler, ROS 2 and DDS data can be connected with FIWARE Orion-LD, making robot status, mission information, inventory context, worker positioning, and safety-related data available to the wider industrial system. This helps KIRO move toward a cleaner and more interoperable architecture, reducing the need for custom connector logic between the robot and the context-management layer.

What eProsima technologies provide

Beyond Vulcanexus, KIRO integrates several eProsima technologies to support communication robustness and scalability, including Fast DDS, Discovery Server, DDS Router and the DDS Enabler.

These tools help coordinate data exchange between different interfaces and applications, supporting a more modular deployment, where robot-side components and industrial data services can be connected in a controlled and reusable way. It also allows the creation of a custom network architecture to adapt to the project's requirements of network traffic and transports.

This enables KIRO to expose robotic capabilities more clearly within the ARISE missions, tasks, and skills model, while keeping the system scalable for future industrial environments where multiple robots, workers, tools, and monitoring services may need to operate together.

A real use case for intelligent tool delivery

The KIRO demonstrator has reached TRL 6, showing a fully functional system in a relevant industrial environment. Its validation includes voice-triggered task execution, autonomous navigation in dynamic spaces, tool identification and manipulation, and human-aware delivery.

The results reported by the project include accurate indoor positioning, fast voice-command processing, successful warehouse management integration, and strong computer-vision performance for tool identification. These results demonstrate the potential of KIRO to improve workflow continuity, reduce operator workload, and support safer collaboration between humans and robots in complex manufacturing spaces.

Supporting the future of collaborative manufacturing

KIRO shows how open middleware and interoperable robotics technologies can help bring advanced automation closer to everyday industrial operations. By combining the expertise of iKnowHow and iLink Nees Technologies with ARISE frameworks such as Vulcanexus and FIWARE Orion-LD, the project creates a reusable foundation for robotic assistants that can understand worker requests, move safely through dynamic environments, and support operators without disrupting their work.

For eProsima, KIRO showcases how Vulcanexus and DDS-based technologies can help bridge the gap between robot-side intelligence and industrial data ecosystems.

For the ARISE ecosystem and the companies behind KIRO, the project demonstrates how human-centric robotics can improve productivity and safety not by removing people from the process, but by giving them better tools, smarter support, and more intuitive ways to collaborate with machines.