PhD Position in SureROB: Design lightweight robotic arm; DC

Organisation/Company Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II Department Department of Industrial Engineering Research Field Engineering » Mechanical engineering Engineering » Materials engineering Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions PhD Positions Country Italy Final date to receive applications 15 Jan 2026 - 23:59 (Europe/Berlin) Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 40 Offer Starting Date 1 Jul 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?

Horizon Europe - MSCA Reference Number DC5 Marie Curie Grant Agreement Number  Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

About the SureROB Project

Development of efficient, safe, green, and reconfigurable manufacturing systems requires seamless integration between software and hardware solutions, requiring cooperation between experts from different fields. The project aims to make advancements in green manufacturing systems through collaborative robots (CoBots), making them viable for SMEs. The field of robotics faces the challenge of a disconnect between experts from computer science that provide generic solutions and the end-users that work and interact with the hardware.

By bridging this gap to enable the development of lightweight, efficient, and sustainable CoBots, SureROB will holistically train skilled researchers to contribute to European manufacturing. Through a well-balanced consortium of renowned academic bodies and industrial partners from seven countries, SureROB will develop and benchmark industrially feasible solutions. The focus would be not only to make the manufacturing process sustainable but also address the sustainability of manufacturing CoBots themselves.

Green tools and techniques will be developed. An important target would be achieving up to 20% reduction in the weight of the robot’s components (drives and arms), resulting in lower energy consumption without compromising on the system reliability and robustness. Structural and geometric optimisation of the drives and arms will be investigated to improve the dynamic behaviour and efficiency with software-based design solutions.

These will be supported with vibration control strategies working in sync with optimised path planning and condition monitoring strategies. Numerical and experimental evaluation of the developed solutions will be conducted for benchmarking them against the reference system. SureROB will address the cost and impact of existing technologies to make them economically feasible and eco-friendly, and will actively disseminate the results, engage with the public, and promote open science.

About the DC5 Project

The quality of the machining process with robots is mainly governed by the accuracy and stiffness of the robots. In addition, a lightweight arm configuration can simplify the operating requirements and condition of a robot.

However, traditional robotic arms still face many challenges in achieving both lightweight and high precision, and innovative configurations deserve strong interest.

Hence, the development of light weight solutions can be essential to increase the efficiency of an industrial process based on collaborative robots and, more in general, to improve the robot’s operation safety.

Nowadays a lightweight design can be achieved with innovative and sustainable manufacturing procedures and with the implementation, in the arm structures, also of some metamaterials or meta-structures, which can enhance the vibration mitigation and isolation behavior of the original material.

In this project a reference robot arm will be selected, and its structural components will be analyzed. The PhD candidate will develop an enhanced design through a dedicated modeling and optimization approach. It will be a multiple-objective optimization based on the need of specific structural rigidity, proper dynamic behavior (natural frequency distribution, dissipative vibration properties of the structure), lower weight and green and sustainable manufacturing process.

The results of this optimization will be evaluated on some prototypes.

The project requires the…