ITAP 2021 - Asia-Pacific's Leading Industry 4.0 Event

Green Compass

The Green Compass (GC) aims to support organisations of all sizes in the manufacturing and service industries in improving their environmental sustainability in alignment with their values to their stakeholders and their business costs. The GC recommends actionable changes in businesses’ organisation and operations—spanning from their own operations to their supply network and product life cycle.

Life Cycle Assessment-Life Cycly Costing (LCA-LCC)

The LCA-LCC platform is a simplified and comprehensive sustainability assessment tool that provides customized and credible reports with localized emission data, that can be used for sustainability planning to help businesses reduce carbon emission and move towards net-zero.

Quantum Dot and Fluorescent Colour Converter

Colour converters using quantum dots and fluorescent dyes that can create tunable spectrums specific for plants’ needs for higher crop yield and faster growth cycle. The colour converters absorb high energy wavelengths of light (e.g. blue) and converts them efficiently into lower energy wavelengths (e.g. green, yellow, orange, red).

Electrochromic Switchable Mirror

The mirror panel can be switched electrically between reflective and transparent states based on reversible electrodeposition mirror (REM) technology, so as to modulate light intensity and solar heat gain in greenhouses. In its bleached (transparent) state, sunlight can be transmitted into the buildings/greenhouses. In its mirror (reflective) state (by applying a low voltage bias), visible light and heat are reflected back into the atmosphere.

Thermoelectric Cooling System

A low power active cooling system that can be applied to extend the lifetime of indoor lighting, inclusive of lighting in vertical farming racks. This technology can be adapted in a high-power lighting system as part of indoor and outdoor lighting systems. The main function is to reduce the temperature of the LED functional area to save energy and extend the lifetime of the LED.

Automated Solar Blind

The solar blind constructed in a louvre-esque system with photovoltaic slats allows light transmission to be modulated by controlling the angle in which the slats are deployed. It provides shading and photovoltaic power generation when sunlight intensity is too strong. It also allows more than 95% light transmission indoors when sunlight is weak. Solar panels harness the unused sunlight to drive the automated system for self-sustainability, and excess energy can be used to power other peripheries in the greenhouse.

Modern Agritech Platform for Food Production

An interactive platform that allows users to design, model and predict the performance of farms according to their preferences. Through the platform, users get to determine the farm's performance with the realistic view of growing plants' life cycle and improve on (i) operation energy usage, (ii) output optimisation, and (iii) interact virtually with farms on site.

Smart Environmental Sensor System for Indoor Farming

The Smart Environmental Sensor System is used to monitor parameters such as CO2 gas concentration, temperature, and humidity of the indoor farming environment, which can be used to control the environment and improve crop productivity.

Smart Integrated NPK Sensor

The Smart Integrated NPK Sensor is a Bluetooth-enabled chip for real-time simultaneous measurements of soil nutrients such as nitrate (N), phosphate (P), potassium (K), and hydrogen (pH) for farming applications such as hydroponics.

Autonomous Indoor Climate Management System

The Autonomous Indoor Climate Management (AICM) system holistically senses and analyzes the relevant indoor climate parameters as well as plant health status. Data-driven forecasting and optimization algorithms provide early detection of anomaly conditions, timely alerts, and control actions for optimal growth conditions with minimum energy consumption.

IoT and Data Management Platform

The IoT & Data Management Platform enables the collection of decentralised sensor data from different sources (e.g. information from different types of sensors) to provide a bird’s eye view of Singapore’s overall food production across different food industries.

Stable Isotope Measurement System

In recent years, food integrity has been considered as a health and quality issue in many countries. Some expensive food items could have been mixed with cheaper items in order to increase the quantity of food item. For example, high-cost natural honey products can be diluted with low-cost sugar or corn syrup and then labelled with false information. It will be difficult for a consumer to find out the truth if the products are not verified by reliable and recognized organizations. At A*STAR, a new reliable measurement system has been established to verify the food authenticity and trace its origins.

Crunch Cutlery x SIMTech IF

Crunch Cutlery is the first startup in Southeast Asia to tackle issues associated with plastic waste, whilst at the same time providing nutritional benefits to consumers – all from a single product. Made up of flaxseed, chia seeds and whole wheat, the edible cutleries give a boost of Omega 3, Vitamin B3, lignans and fibre; and act as a substitute to plastic utensils.

To scale up their business objectives, Crunch Cutlery engaged Innovation Factory@SIMTech to re-engineer the outlook and design of the edible cutleries, sticking to an ergonomic approach and yet not losing the essence of organic and wellness.

Sustainable Packaging
(A*STAR x Aegis Packaging x Nutriient)

Research efforts to make food packaging more environmentally sustainable has resulted in the development of a high barrier coating technology that when coated onto polyolefin films, allows for production of mono-polyolefin films to achieve the same high barrier functionalities as conventional multiple-material food packaging.

This is shown through the ITAP gift at the physical booth where low-GI oat cookies formulated by A*STAR’s SIFBI, are packaged in sustainable film that was developed by A*STAR’s IMRE.

Advanced Modular Production and Piloting Platform

This platform combines the flexibility of modular production with the efficiency of digitalisation along the asset lifecycle to realise a first-in-its-class next generation chemical production platform which helps technologies and products to reach adoption and market faster than before.

Supply Chain Digital Twin

The Supply Chain Digital Twin solution can provide a real-time end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, which includes sustainability KPI dashboards. Our solution leverages on digital technologies such as IIoT, Machine Learning, Simulation, and Optimization, to provide visibility of key sustainability KPIs such as material consumption, energy consumption, emissions, and waste.

Condition Monitoring (I²R)

A*STAR’s Condition Monitoring system adopts AI models in the monitoring of equipment health and its remaining useful life, as well as the monitoring of defective products in a manufacturing line. It ensures the earlier intervention to prevent equipment failure resulting in downtime and also reduces the number of defects thus optimising production.

Interoperability in Robotics Middleware Framework

A*STAR is part of Robot Operating System Industrial (ROS-Industrial), an open-source initiative that extends the advanced ROS based open-source robotics technologies to industrial grade hardware and applications. ROS-industrial helps to lower the barrier of the development and deployment of vendor-agnostic advanced robotics solutions that are built with an open architecture to maximize system interoperability; hence helps to minimize the total cost of deployment for the end user companies.

Automated Pick & Pack

The 2D/3D vision-based robotic pick-and-pack solution was developed with advanced deep learning-based algorithms that support flexible picking and packing of mixed products or store keeping units (SKUs), which is increasingly needed to support any-mix-any-volume (AMAV) manufacturing and hyper-personalized order fulfilment operations.

Mobile Manipulation

Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) are gaining strong momentum in manufacturing, logistics, and service applications, from basic transportation, item delivery, to more sophisticated integrated mobile manipulation, such as machine tending, cooperative part handling/delivery, shelf replenishment, and so on. The whole-body mobile manipulation technology developed allows synchronous and more efficient path-planning and motion-planning for mobile operations, with high performance and assured safety.

Adaptive End Effectors

In A*STAR, we develop robot end-effectors with unique functions to meet the dynamic requirements for high-mix, low-volume advanced manufacturing environments. Intelligent force controlled end-effectos were developed for achieving precision robotic manipulation such as sanding and polishing. Adaptive universal grippers with underactuated and variable-stiffness features were developed for handling objects with unknown or irregular shapes and various material properties.

Integrated Water Circularity System

This technology offers a new concept to mitigate secondary contamination in wastewater treatment process through a non-chemical approach, which has been developed and translated to an integrated pilot scale water line.

The current pilot line combines A*STAR’s electrochemical advance oxidation process (EAOP), nano bubble generation and our unique ceramic membranes.

Automated Sorting Bin

This is a smart bin platform that integrates AI image recognition and complex human-behavioural algorithms with a mechanical separation system to automatically identify and bin consumers’ disposed waste between recyclables and non-recyclables.

Food Waste Digester
(A*STAR x Westcom Bio-Tech)

In collaboration with Westcom Bio-Tech, A*STAR developed a unique microbial treatment with better operation and energy efficiency for conversion of local food waste into organic fertiliser, which can then be re-injected into the food production ecosystem, completing the food resource loop.

Recycled PET Blends for 3D Printing

At A*STAR, research efforts to improve the physical properties of recycled PET materials for 3D printing was conducted. The toughening of recycled PET material into extrusion-based printable filament aims to replace the use of neat plastic materials (e.g. PLA or ABS) in low functional applications.

Circular Polymer Economy
(A*STAR x Containers Printers)

A chemical process was developed with Containers Printers to recycle the polyethylene (PE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) commonly found in multi-layer films by selective extraction and glycolysis to deliver a high quality PE recyclate, as well as highly pure (ideally food-grade quality) raw material for repolymerization to PET.