Robotics and Automation Magazine

December 2004

The FET (Future & Emerging Technologies) program (http://www.cordis.lu/ist/fet) of IST (Information Society Technologies) program of the Information Society Directorate General of the European Commission is to promote long-term research aiming at opening new possibilities for future research programs. Towards that target, for the 7^th framework program FET set proactive activities such as Beyond Robotics, Complex Systems Research and Disappearing Computer etc.

"Beyond Robotics" (see: http://www.cordis.lu/ist/fetro.htm) was launched in 2003 in order to promote European research in the area. The initiative concentrated on three specific objectives:

• The development of cognitive robots whose "purpose in life" would be to serve humans as assistants or "companions",  
• Hybrid bionic systems that would augment human capabilities such as perception of the environment, motion, interaction with other humans etc., and
• The development of autonomous microrobot groups ('robot ecologies'), consisting of many heterogeneous members exhibiting collective behaviour and intelligence.  

Towards the first objective, project COGNIRON ("The Cognitive Robot Companion" - http://www.cogniron.org) was awarded to ten partners from 7 countries. With a duration of 4years has a budget ~8M€. The COGNIRON objective is to study the perceptual, representational, reasoning and learning capabilities of embodied robots in human-centered environments. The project aims to develop methods and technologies for the construction of cognitive robots that will be able to evolve and grow their capacities in close interaction with humans, which will be able to serve humans as companions in their daily life. The design of the cognitive functions of this artificial creature and the study and development of the continuous learning, training and education process in the course of which it will mature to a true companion, are the central research themes of the project. Expected results are basic methods, algorithms and architectures and their integration and long-term experimentation and scientific evaluation on embodied robotic systems in different settings and situations.  

NEUROBOTICS ("The fusion of Neuroscience and Robotics for augmenting human capabilities" - http://www.neurobotics.info) was awarded towards the second objective. Sixteen partners from seven European countries in addition to one from the US and one from the Japan will cooperate for 4 years with a budget of 6.7M€. The main objective is to pursue a strategic alliance between Neuroscience and Robotics by exploring the area of Hybrid Bionic Systems (HBSs) to deeply investigate the theme of human augmentation. Starting from the most advanced state of the art in neuroscience, the project will aim at developing new integrated robotic artefacts, as much biomorphic as required to be effectively interfaced with human body and brain. Three robotic platforms featuring different levels of hybridness (i.e. mechanical coupling with the human body) and of connectivity (to the human nervous system) will be developed to be used in experiments on human augmentation: biomimetic scalable artefacts to be remotely controlled by a human operator (beyond tele-operation); intelligent wearable artefacts loosely physically coupled with the human body (beyond prostheses); arm-hand sub-systems tightly physically coupled with the human body (beyond ortheses).  

The third objective is the theme of I-SWARM ("Intelligent Small World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation" - http://www.i-swarm.org) awarded to 10 research teams from 8 countries for 4 years and a budget of ~5M€. Technological problems in miniaturizing systems have to date been huge obstacles towards building artificial "ant robots" which closely co-operate as a swarm. The I-Swarm project wants to be a stepping stone towards an artificial ant (yet, building such an ant robot having all capabilities of natural ants, is still years from now) and aims to take a leap forward in robotics research by combining experts in microrobotics, in distributed and adaptive systems as well as in self-organizing biological swarm systems. The project will produce technological advances to facilitate the mass-production of microrobots, which can then be employed as a "real" swarm consisting of up to 1,000 robot clients. These clients will all be equipped with limited, on-board intelligence. The swarm will consist of a huge number of different robot types, with various sensors, manipulators and computational power. Such a robot swarm can perform a variety of applications, including micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks.

The authors of this column want to thank the Coordinators of the above projects and their assistants for providing material for this report. Parties interested in promoting certain activities via this column can contact either Kostas Kyriakopoulos (http://users.ntua.gr/kkyria, kkyria AT central.ntua.gr) or Bruno Siciliano (http://wpage.unina.it/sicilian, siciliano AT unina.it).

Contributed by Kostas Kyriakopoulos and Bruno Siciliano