10 September 2026

On the Shop Floor with GOSAN: EnduRAI Gets to Grips with Real Manufacturing Constraints

Industrial R&D often starts at a desk, with technology reaching the shop floor only once a prototype exists. The EnduRAI team took a different approach with its Spanish pilot partner GOSAN: first observe how the work is actually done, understand the production environment and speak with the people who know it best.

Understanding the production environment
For more than 50 years, GOSAN has manufactured mechanical parts and assemblies for lifting and transport machinery, shipping over 35,000 custom parts a year to 70 countries. Its production involves cutting, bending, welding and grinding, combining automated processes with skilled manual work.

GOSAN provides a valuable real-world setting for testing EnduRAI’s approach. In precision manufacturing, subtle changes in an operator’s movements can influence process and product quality and may only become visible during subsequent quality control. EnduRAI is exploring whether wearable sensing and real-time monitoring can help identify such changes earlier, complementing existing quality-control processes.

From observation to requirements
The site visit focused on understanding how EnduRAI’s technologies could fit into GOSAN’s existing production environment. The team observed different stages of the production process, with particular attention to welding and grinding, operator movements and parameter adjustments, as well as existing workflows and quality-control procedures.

Seeing these processes first-hand provided important context for the development of the EnduRAI system. Discussions with operators complemented these observations and helped the team understand how sensing and feedback technologies can be designed to be useful, comfortable and compatible with everyday work. Questions of ergonomics, usability, trust and privacy are therefore considered from the beginning of the development process.

For the GOSAN pilot, EnduRAI plans to combine an sEMG wristband measuring muscular activity with infrared and visual cameras monitoring the production process and part geometry. Insights from the visit will help determine how these technologies can be integrated with minimal disruption to established workflows.

The visit is an important step towards developing a system grounded in the realities of industrial work. Whether the technologies can reliably identify relevant patterns and provide useful feedback under real production conditions will be assessed during the pilot phase.

What comes next
The findings from GOSAN will now inform the design of the wristband, camera setup and feedback interface for the pilot. Testing will examine whether the EnduRAI approach can support operators and existing quality-control processes while contributing to the project’s targets of reducing defects and rework and improving productivity.

GOSAN is one of EnduRAI’s two industrial pilot sites. The second, at CEMRE Shipyard in Turkey, will test the approach in a different industrial environment. Together, the pilots will provide evidence on how human-centric sensing and AI can support workers and production processes across different industrial settings.

EnduRAI is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority (HADEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.