Collaborative Robotics in Textile Manufacturing
TIAGo Pro at CETRIKO
Sep 07, 2026 — CETRIKO faced a workflow that was essential to production but hard on its people: loading and unloading yarn cones, weighing up to 6 kg, into vertical creels reaching two metres in height, hundreds of times a day, in a noisy, dusty environment with narrow corridors and occasionally slippery floors.© PAL Robotics
Technical textile manufacturer CETRIKO, based in Centelles, Spain, employs around 200 people across two production sites and supplies knitted fabrics to the automotive, healthcare and home furnishing sectors.
To address the physical strain and injury risk this created, PAL Robotics deployed its TIAGo Pro mobile manipulator at CETRIKO as part of the EU Horizon Europe JARVIS project, through the final validation pilot known as CO-HAND.
TIAGo Pro on the floor
TIAGo Pro combines an omnidirectional mobile base, dual robotic arms, a lifting torso and a custom adaptive gripper to carry out three tasks that previously fell entirely to operators:
- Scanning creels for empty slots, using a camera-based perception system trained on factory imagery to cope with the site's variable lighting and dust.
- Replenishing cones, picking new cones from a supply rack prepared by operators and inserting them into narrow vertical slots using force-sensitive control, so the robot can feel its way into place rather than relying on pre-programmed precision alone.
- Working visibly alongside people, communicating its status through an industrial tablet interface and LED signals rather than voice, since machine noise on the shop floor makes audio alerts unreliable. Torque sensors and 360° obstacle detection let it react immediately to human contact.
What the validation showed
The final CO-HAND trials were controlled tests carried out in CETRIKO’s live production environment, under the supervision of PAL Robotics engineers and with CETRIKO operators involved in the setup and execution of the trials. Within that scope, the results were notable:
- 100% operator acceptance. All seven operators involved in the user study said they would use the robot daily.
- 15.6% workload relief, with the robot autonomously managing 30 of the facility's 192 creel columns, removing that share of repetitive heavy lifting and high reaching from operators' routines.
- 45% reduction in setup time, achieved through single-button task initiation and automated task sequencing, compared with manually re-teaching coordinates.
- 85% grasping success rate for physical extraction and placement using the custom gripper.
The system reached Technology Readiness Level 7: validated through structured trials in a real production setting, a step beyond lab testing but still short of unattended, full-scale commercial operation.
What this means for manufacturing floors
This work is EU-funded, but its relevance is not limited to CETRIKO. It addresses a problem common across light manufacturing and intralogistics: repetitive, physically demanding material handling that is difficult to automate with fixed robotics because it requires flexibility, force sensitivity and safe operation alongside people. CETRIKO's environment, noisy, cluttered, and only partially predictable, is a realistic proxy for many factory floors, which is what makes the operator acceptance and workload figures meaningful beyond this one site.
PAL Robotics is now working towards commercial maturation: improving navigation for slippery floor conditions, extending the gripper and manipulation pipeline to handle the heaviest 6 kg cones, and integrating the validated CO-HAND capabilities into PAL Robotics' commercial TIAGo Pro package for light manufacturing and intralogistics customers beyond CETRIKO.
