2004

Funding: European Commission (FP6 FET 2002-2.3.4.2)

Duration: 1 January 2004 – 30 June 2007.

Partners: Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes, France; Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland; Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation, Germany; Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands; University of Bielefeld, Germany; University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom; University of Karlsruhe, Germany; Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH), Switzerland.

Description: The overall objectives of this project are to study the perceptual, representational, reasoning and learning capabilities of embodied robots in human centred environments. The project will develop methods and technologies for the construction of such cognitive robots able to evolve and grow their capacities in close interaction with humans in an open-ended fashion.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. In the focus of this research endeavour is the development of a robot whose ultimate task is to serve humans as a companion in their daily life. The robot is not only considered as a ready-made device but as an artificial creature, which improves its capabilities in a continuous process of acquiring new knowledge and skills. Besides the necessary functions for sensing, moving and acting, such a robot will exhibit the cognitive capacities enabling it to focus its attention, to understand the spatial and dynamic structure of its environment and to interact with it, to exhibit a social behaviour and communicate with other agents and with humans at the appropriate level of abstraction according to context. 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 proposed project.

URL: http://www.cogniron.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST 004176)

Duration: 1 July 2004 – 30 June 2007.

Partners: Linköping University, Sweden; Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Germany; University of Surrey, United Kingdom; Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic.

Description:Artificial Cognitive Systems (ACS) will become a future key technology with high impact on economy, society, and daily life. Autonomous robots with perceptual capabilities can be applied in many areas such as production, public and private service, science, etc. The current state of research on ACS shows essential lacking concerning the design and architecture of the systems. In the COSPAL project, we propose a new ACS architecture in order to overcome these limitations. In the COSPAL architecture we combine techniques from the field of artificial intelligence (AI) for symbolic reasoning and learning of artificial neural networks (ANN) for association of percepts and states in a bidirectional way, see Figure 1. We establish feedback loops through the continuous and the symbolic parts of the system, which allow perception-action feedback at several levels in the system. After an initial boot- strapping phase, incremental learning techniques are used to train the system simultaneously at different levels, allowing adaptation and exploration. We expect the COSPAL architecture to allow the design of systems that show, to a large extent, autonomous behaviour. The COSPAL architecture follows a new approach to cognitive systems, which is supposed to finally solve hard, large scale, inverse problems where classical AI and statistical methods have failed. The COSPAL project is a first attempt to realize systems following the new architectural concepts. As every new approach, the COSPAL architecture has to be tested first in very simple settings, which seem to be trivial in context of classical methods using predefined models or rule sets to solve these simple problems much more efficient.

URL: http://www.cospal.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST 004250)

Duration: 1 September 2004 – 31 August 2008.

Partners: Kungl Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden; University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; University of Paris V, France; Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstlishce Intelligenz, Germany; Alfred Ludvig University of Freiburg, Germany; TU Darmstadt, Germany; University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Description: The main goal of the project was to advance the science of cognitive systems through a multi-disciplinary investigation of requirements, design options and trade-offs for human-like, autonomous, integrated, physical (eg., robot) systems, including requirements for architectures, for forms of representation, for perceptual mechanisms, for learning, planning, reasoning and motivation, for action and communication.

URL: http://www.cognitivesystems.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 FET 507728)

Duration: 1 May 2004 – 30 April 2008

Partners: Kungl Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden; Universität Karlsruhe, Germany; Universitat Jaume I, Spain; Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Spain; Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule (ETH), Switzerland; Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy; Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung eV/IPA, Germany; Gesellschaft für Produktionssysteme GMBH, Germany; Technische Universität Wien, Austria; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; České vysoké učení technické v Praze, Czech Republic; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain; Tallinna Tehnikaülikool, Estonia; Syddansk Universitet, Denmark; Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; National Technical University of Athens, (Εθνικό Μετσόβιο Πολυτεχείο), Greece; Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia) Hungary; University of Ulster, United Kingdom; Tel Aviv University, Israel; Politechnika Warszawska, Poland; Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica, Portugal; Institutu Jožef Stefan, Slovenia; University of Oulu (Oulun yliopisto), Finland; University of Plymouth, United Kingdom.

Description: Network of excellence, predecessor of the current http://www.euron.org.

URL: http://www.euron.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST 2002 507006)

Duration: 1 January 2004 – 31 June 2008.

Partners: Universität Karlsruhe; Uppsala University; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; Fraunhofer-Institut für Biomedizinische Technik, St. Ingbert; National Technical University of Athens; Sheffield Hallam University; Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e Perfezionamento Sant’Anna, Pisa; Universitat de Barcelona; University of Stuttgart.

Description: The fundamental outcome of the project is a swarm of micro-robots, which is capable of performing tasks that are not possible with neither one single micro-robot nor with a small group of micro-robots. The outcome is the realisation of an observable self-organisation effect in the robot swarm similar to that seen within other ecological systems such as ant and bee colonies as well as other social insects. There are many potential benefits of such a system including greater flexibility and adaptability of the system to the environment, robustness to failures, etc. Moreover, their collective behaviour opens up new application fields that cannot be solved using today’s tools. The individual agents are able to communicate with each other with a suitable sophisticated IR-based onboard-system, and thus enable and promote the desired swarm effect. A major goal of the project is to transform knowledge gained by observations of eusocial insect behaviour, from observations of communicating insect aggregations and research already performed on swarm intelligence of robots and to apply this to the completely new swarm (concerning swarm and robot size) of micro-robots.

URL: http://www.i-swarm.org

Funding: European Commission (IST 2002 003747)

Duration: 1 October 2004 – 31 December 2008.

Partners: Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany; Technische Universität Munchen, Germany; Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Greece; The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Universidade do Minho, Portugal.

Description: The main aim of the JAST project is to develop robots that are able to engage in joint action with each other or with a human through communicating and working intelligently on mutual tasks in dynamic unstructured environments.

The JAST project studies joint action in a multidisciplinary framework involving neuroscientist, cognitive psychologists, roboticists, and psycholinguists. It exploits a prototypical research paradigm - a model construction task - to analyze human behavior and brain function during joint action (e.g., planning, acting, communicating, error monitoring). The behavioural and neuroscientific results provide insights and guidelines to support the development of the artificial, intelligently interacting agents.

By extending the typical level of analysis of cognitive systems from single to multiple individuals acting together, JAST's R&D will impact the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive and brain science. The project will also help to develop a new class of embodied artifacts, based on the concept of cognitive skill growth, to ensure that the functionality of future technologies includes inherent concepts of cooperative behavior.

URL: http://www.euprojects-jast.net

Funding: European Commission (FP6 FET 003758)

Duration: 1 September 2004 – 31 August 2007.

Partners: Fondation de l'Institut dalle Molle d'Intelligence Artificielle Perceptive (IDIAP), Switzerland; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland; Fondazione Santa Lucia-Rome, Italy; Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.

Description: MAIA aims at developing non-invasive prosthesis. In particular, a brain-computer interface recognizes the subject’s voluntary intent to do primitive motor actions on the order of milliseconds and conveys this intention to a robot that implements the necessary low-level details for achieving complex tasks.

URL: http://www.maia-project.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST 2004 511931)

Duration: 1 October 2004 – 30 September 2007.

Partners: Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Italy; Dalle Molle Institure for Artificial Intelligence, Switzerland; Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal; Lund University Cognitive Science, Sweden; New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria; Open Source Enterprise, Italy; Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Austria; Wugsburg University, Germany.

Description: The goal of MindRACES has been to investigate different anticipatory cognitive mechanisms and architectures in order to build cognitive systems endowed with the ability to predict the outcome of their actions, to build a model of future events, to control their perception and attention by anticipating future stimuli and to emotionally react to possible future scenarios. Anticipatory behaviours are precisely those behaviours enabled by predictive capabilities.

URL: http://www.mindraces.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST-001917)

Duration: 1 January 2004 – 31 December 2007.

Partners: Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna; College de France; Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfarth; Institute for Biomedical Engineering; Karolinska Institutet; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan; National Technical University of Athens; Umeå University; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; University of Genoa; University of Parma; Universite P. et M. Curie; Universita' Campus Biomedico; Universita' di Ferrara; Brown University; Waseda University; Pont-Tech.

Description: The ultimate objective of the NEUROBOTICS project is very ambitious, yet clear and well defined: to introduce a discontinuity in the robot design, thus going literally ‘Beyond Robotics’. This discontinuity will be pursued by a strategic alliance between Neuroscience and Robotics, which will go well beyond present, mostly fragmented, collaborations, and lead to overcome state-of-the-art of robotics worldwide. The scientific, technological and cultural environment in Europe is mature to face this challenge, whose impact in engineering and medicine could be comparable to that recognized to ‘big science’ projects. NEUROBOTICS will systematically explore the area of Hybrid Bionic Systems (HBSs).

URL: http://www.neurobotics.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST--004370)

Duration: 1 September 2004 – 31 August 2009.

Partners: University of Genova, Italy; Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Italy; University of Zurich, Switzerland; University of Uppsala, Sweden; University of Ferrara, Italia; University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom; IST Lisbon, Portugal; University of Sheffield, United Kingdom; Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland; Telerobot S.r.l., Italy; Italian Institute of Technology, Italy.

Description: The main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 3.5 year old child: the iCub. This is an open project in many different ways: we distribute the platform openly, we develop software open-source, and we are open to including new partners and form collaboration worldwide.

URL: http://www.robotcub.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 2003-IST-004690)

Duration: 1 September 2004 – 31 August 2007.

Partners: University of Catania; University of Bielefeld; Analogic
Computers Ltd; Innovaciones Microelectrònicas s.l.; Universidad
Complutense de Madrid; University of Edinburgh.

Description: The aim of the SPARK Project is to develop new sensing-perceiving-moving artefacts inspired by the basic principles of living systems and based on the concept of "self-organization". Sensors will be treated as devices processing signals distributed in space and also showing non linear time dynamics. Perception will be studied as a result of a spatio-temporal pattern forming process, determined by information deriving from sensors and will directly influence the particular associated motor behaviour. The whole methodology will be implemented in a new architecture, a Spatial-temporal array computer based structure (SPARC), providing a new paradigm for active perception based on principles borrowed from psychology, synergetics, artificial intelligence and nonlinear dynamical systems theory.

URL: http://www.spark.diees.unict.it