INDUSTRIA AUXILIAR JUEMA SL

Their core work

JUEMA is a Spanish manufacturing SME based in Onil, the historic center of Spain's toy industry — a town where auxiliary manufacturers supply components, tooling, and production services to the broader consumer goods sector. They bring hands-on factory-floor expertise to EU research consortia, acting as an industrial end-user that grounds academic or technology-driven projects in real production constraints. Their participation in SOFTMANBOT signals direct relevance to the challenge of automating the handling of soft and deformable materials (foam, plush, flexible plastics) — exactly the kind of problem faced daily by toy and consumer goods manufacturers. They serve as a bridge between robotics research and practical industrial deployment.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

JUEMA's first project, ToyLabs (2017-2018), carried no technical keywords and focused on process-level innovation — specifically how toy industry SMEs could engage with FabLabs and co-creation models. By 2019, their profile shifted sharply toward hard technology: SOFTMANBOT brought them into a technically dense research environment covering AI vision, multi-sensor robotic control, and manipulation of deformable objects. This is not a random pivot — it reflects a natural progression from "how do we modernize our industry" to "how do we automate our hardest production problems." The trajectory points toward JUEMA becoming a recurring industrial validation partner for advanced manufacturing robotics.

JUEMA is positioning as an industrial end-user testbed for robotic automation of soft and deformable material handling — a technically unsolved problem with direct relevance to toy, textile, and flexible packaging manufacturers.

How they like to work

JUEMA has participated exclusively as a consortium partner across both projects, never taking a coordination role. Despite only two projects, they engaged with 17 unique partners across 7 countries — suggesting they are active, integrated contributors within their consortia rather than passive participants. This pattern is typical of industrial SMEs that provide real production environments, end-user requirements, and validation capacity, rather than driving research agendas.

JUEMA has built a surprisingly broad network of 17 unique partners across 7 countries from just two projects, indicating genuine engagement within both consortia. Their partnerships span Southern and Northern Europe, consistent with the cross-national composition typical of RIA and IA projects in manufacturing and digital sectors.

What sets them apart

Few manufacturing SMEs in Spain combine direct toy industry production experience with documented involvement in advanced soft-material robotics research — JUEMA sits at that exact intersection. Their location in Onil gives them access to a dense cluster of toy manufacturers who share the same automation challenges, making them a credible voice for an underrepresented industrial community in EU research. For consortium builders targeting real-world validation in consumer goods or flexible material manufacturing, JUEMA offers sector legitimacy that a university or research institute simply cannot replicate.

Highlights from their portfolio

• SOFTMANBOT
  JUEMA's largest project by far (EUR 383,094), covering frontier robotics topics — AI vision, dexterous grippers, deformable object manipulation — directly applicable to their core manufacturing environment.
• ToyLabs
  JUEMA's entry into EU-funded research, connecting the toy manufacturing sector to open innovation and FabLab co-creation — an unusual combination that established their European research network.