INSTITUTO TECNOLOGICO DEL CALZADO Y CONEXAS

Their core work

INESCOP is Spain's national technology institute for the footwear and related soft-goods industries, providing R&D, testing, certification, and industrial consultancy to manufacturers across the sector. In EU research, they have carved out a specific niche: advanced robotics for handling soft, flexible, and deformable materials — the exact challenge that makes footwear production one of the hardest manufacturing sectors to automate. They bring something rare to robotics consortia: an industrial testbed with domain expertise in leather, textiles, and flexible components, allowing them to validate robotic solutions under real production conditions. Their contribution to projects is typically applied and sector-specific, translating robotics research into workable solutions for footwear and soft-goods manufacturers.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

INESCOP's two projects span 2019–2020 entry points, so the timeline is compressed, but the keyword shift is still meaningful. Their earlier project (SOFTMANBOT) concentrated on the perception and sensing side of robotics — how a robot sees, feels, and grips a soft object — with emphasis on smart grippers, AI vision, and human-robot collaboration at the workstation level. Their later project (APRIL) shifted toward system-level questions: how do you deploy flexible, multipurpose robotic cells across a manufacturing facility using federated architectures and adaptable robot hands. The trend moves from single-robot capability building toward factory-wide flexible automation, suggesting growing ambition in the scope of problems they are tackling.

INESCOP is moving from component-level robotics research (sensors, grippers, vision) toward integrated flexible manufacturing systems, positioning them as a future partner for Industry 4.0 automation projects targeting soft-goods and textile sectors.

How they like to work

INESCOP has participated exclusively as a consortium partner — never as coordinator — across both H2020 projects, indicating they prefer to contribute specialist knowledge rather than manage project administration. Their 24 unique partners across 2 projects (roughly 12 per project) places them in large, multinational consortia typical of RIA robotics calls. This suggests they are brought in specifically for their footwear-sector testbed and domain application expertise, rather than for research leadership or project management capacity.

INESCOP has built a network of 24 consortium partners across 10 countries through just two projects, reflecting the large collaborative nature of EU robotics RIAs. Their geographic footprint is fully European, with no indication of repeated partnerships that would suggest a tight inner circle.

What sets them apart

INESCOP occupies a rare position at the intersection of sectoral industrial expertise and applied robotics research: most robotics research institutes lack deep knowledge of footwear and soft-goods manufacturing, and most footwear industry players lack the R&D capacity to engage in EU research projects. This dual identity makes them a credible application partner for any robotics or automation consortium that needs to demonstrate impact in textile, leather, or flexible-material production environments. For a consortium coordinator, INESCOP brings an industrial validation site and end-user perspective that is very hard to find elsewhere in Europe.

Highlights from their portfolio

• SOFTMANBOT
  The largest of INESCOP's two projects (€622,625 EC funding), it combined AI vision, multi-sensor control, and smart dexterous grippers specifically for soft material handling — directly addressing the core automation bottleneck in footwear manufacturing.
• APRIL
  Tackled the harder system-level challenge of multipurpose, federated robotic cells for deformable materials, signalling INESCOP's evolution toward flexible factory-wide automation rather than single-station robotics.