COMAU SPA

Their core work

COMAU is a major Italian industrial automation company (part of the Stellantis group) that designs and builds advanced robotic systems, automated production lines, and manufacturing solutions. In H2020, they bring deep expertise in human-robot collaboration, flexible manufacturing cells, and predictive maintenance platforms to large-scale research consortia. Their work spans the full chain from robot hardware and safety systems to digital twins, AI-driven perception, and modular factory architectures. They serve as an industrial end-user and technology integrator, validating research results in real production environments.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

COMAU's early H2020 projects (2015–2018) focused on factory digitization, software platforms for robotics, supply chain coordination, and production reconfiguration — essentially the infrastructure layer of Industry 4.0. From 2018 onward, their focus shifted sharply toward human-robot collaboration, AI-driven perception, mobile robotics, and worker-centric manufacturing, reflecting the broader industry move from automating tasks to enabling safe human-machine coexistence. Their most recent projects (ODIN, PENELOPE, DIMOFAC) combine both threads — modular digital factories where humans and robots work side by side.

COMAU is moving toward intelligent, adaptive factories where mobile robots and humans collaborate safely — expect future work in AI-driven cobotics, digital twins, and worker augmentation.

How they like to work

COMAU overwhelmingly joins as a participant (16 of 17 projects), coordinating only once (SERENA). This is typical for large industrial companies that contribute real-world manufacturing use cases and validation environments rather than leading the research agenda. With 243 unique partners across 23 countries, they operate as a high-connectivity hub — a go-to industrial partner that many different consortia want on board for credibility and access to production-grade robotics infrastructure.

COMAU has collaborated with 243 unique partners across 23 countries, making them one of the most broadly connected industrial robotics companies in H2020. Their network spans nearly all EU member states, with particularly strong ties to manufacturing and digital innovation ecosystems in Western and Southern Europe.

What sets them apart

COMAU is not a research lab — they are one of the world's largest industrial automation companies, which means they bring actual factory floors, production robots, and commercial manufacturing expertise to every project they join. This makes them an exceptionally valuable consortium partner: they can validate research prototypes in real industrial conditions, provide access to commercial-grade robotic platforms, and ensure results are production-ready rather than lab-only. Few partners in H2020 can match their combination of robotics hardware capability, manufacturing domain knowledge, and scale.

Highlights from their portfolio

• SHERLOCK
  Largest single EC contribution (EUR 884K) and their most comprehensive human-robot collaboration project, covering cobots, exoskeletons, mobile robots, VR training, and AI cognition.
• SERENA
  Their only coordinated project — a predictive maintenance platform showing COMAU stepping into a leadership role on industrial digitization.
• HR-Recycler
  Unusual application of their robotics expertise to e-waste recycling, combining human-robot collaboration with AI perception for WEEE disassembly — a strong sustainability angle.