2007

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST-)

Duration: 2007 –

Partners: Vienna University of Technology, Austria; Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; LAAS-CNRS, France; Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI), Germany; ZENON, Greece; ETP – Electronics Trading & Production e. K., Germany.

Description: This project will primarily advance the state of the art in high-level communication with and among robots. This communication will be based on a high-level discourse model derived from human communication. Rather than focusing on improvements of a single mode (like speech), communication will be multimodal and even involve behaviours (like movements and gestures) as well as their recognition for advanced Human-Robot Interaction. The discourse model will serve as a basis for advanced Robot-Robot Interaction as well. In effect, a major objective of this work is a unified communication approach. It will be implemented in a software platform for communication. Based on this advanced approach to communication, both close cooperation of robots with people and cooperating robots will be facilitated. Information exchange amongst robots about the status of the shared environment will make the navigation in cluttered areas more efficient and safe. While collaborative behaviour is important, several other issues related to advanced behaviour of robots in dynamic environments will be addressed as well: detection and avoidance of dynamic obstacles, self-localization based on landmarks, learning of a topological map indexed by these landmarks, as well as autonomous navigation based on topological and metrical information. So, a major objective of this work is to tackle more complex environments for robots as compared to previous work. For showing the feasibility of the proposed innovations, a prototype robot will be developed in the course of this project – a robot trolley. This robot will be a prototype for such trolleys to be used in supermarkets, airports, etc. In addition to carrying goods and to guide a user in a
complex, structured and dynamic environment, it will have a second function as a walking aid. This function will support a challenged and/or elderly person to lean on the trolley while the walking pace is controlled to follow a user-determined setting.

URL: http://commrob.zenon.gr

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST-045350)

Duration: 1 February 2007 – 31 August 2009.

Partners: Foundation for Research and Technology, Greece; University
of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg,
Germany; Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece; University of
Geneva, Switserland; Neobotix GPS, Germany; Acapela Group; Hanson Robotics,
United States of America; Foundation of Hellenic World, Greece; National
Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos", Greece;

Description: The goal of INDIGO is to develop technology that will facilitate the advancement of human-robot interaction. This will be achieved both by enabling robots to perceive natural human behaviour as well as by making them act in ways that are familiar to humans.

To achieve its goals, INDIGO will exploit and advance various enabling technologies. Additionally, it will focus on the integration of the involved technologies in a robotic platform.

URL: http://www.ics.forth.gr/indigo

Funding: European Commission (FP6-2005-IST-6)

Duration: 1 January 2007 – 31 December 2009

Partners: French Atomic Energy Commission, France; AirRobot Gmbh,
Germany; Eberhardt-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany; Thales Security
Systems, France; Lisippos Consulting Engineers S.A., Greece.

Description: The objective of this project is the development of a new concept of completely autonomous flying robot equipped with monitoring sensors. In order to survey small size area or non-moving scene the flying robot must be able to perform stationary flight. In addition, it must be rapidly deployable. The project will therefore concern rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).This machine will be a small size VTOL (Vertical take Off and Landing) UAV designed for autonomous inspection and survey task in urban area or more generally in constrained outside environment (known and unknown environment with moving obstacles). Using the autonomy faculty of the robot, users will be able to devote their attention to the exploitation of the data coming from the mission sensors, and not on the navigation of the vector.

The heart of the project is the development of software and hardware modules for the autonomy of small size drones in term of navigation, localization and robustness to unexpected events. To reach this goal, different scientific fields will be addressed: mission planning, collision avoidance, trajectory and localization algorithms and drone hardware.

In addition to the sensors used for the flight autonomy, the drone will be able to carry specific sensors for the survey mission (Video, temperature, others …). However the research activities will not be axed on efficiency of the mission sensors, for which the technologies are already well mastered. They will instead focus on the decisional autonomy of a flying robot able to carry such sensors.

The flying robot will evolve in a constrained urban environment with human presence. For safety reasons, we will therefore demonstrate the efficiency of the decisional autonomy feature by developing an innovative an secure small size robot (it is also a more safe way to use it on crowded urban area). However, it is important to note that all the results of the project (and more specifically that relative to autonomy) will be easily adaptable to bigger VTOL or other kind of flying mobile robots.

URL: http://www.ist-microdrones.org

Funding: European Commission (FP6 NEST-043374)

Duration: 1 January 2007 – 31 March 2009

Partners: University of Sunderland, United Kingdom; MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, United Kingdom; University of Parma, Italy.

Description: A wealth of new knowledge has been produced by recent NEST projects exploring verbal and visual communication. In this Specific Support Action NESTCOM we propose to emphasise the interdisciplinary element by focusing on the central question “what it means to communicate”. As our main focus we will explore the characteristics of human communication and their relationships to the role of networks of mirror neurons. The need now is for careful development and communication of experimental hypotheses for investigation by future projects, and that is the goal of this project. This particular conceptual and practical issue raises the focus of ongoing specific research to more global issues and considers how higher cognitive faculties might relate to human communication.

URL: http://www.his.sunderland.ac.uk/nestcom

Funding: European Defence Agency (EDA B-0004-ESM2-ERG)

Duration: 2007 – 2010.

Partners: Royal Military Academy (32), Oto Melara, Italy; Dhiel, Germany, Sener, Spain.

Description: Concerning the famous 3D’s of a robotic task or mission (dirty-dull-dangerous), the vision for the future is to develop groups of mobile and autonomous (re-)acting vehicles, e.g. land vehicles, which fulfill their pre-planned tasks by themselves and report the results to the operator in an effective manner

Following an efficient way of research and development, this project addresses first the simulation framework for such an autonomous behaving group of unmanned vehicles to understand the necessary modules (sensors, navigation, coordination, Man-Machine-Interface etc.) design and inter-actions for emerging autonomous functionalities under the control of an operator. In a second step, this will lead to a more effective hardware design without the necessity to always test technological implementations only in real hardware (which will be costs driving).
This project NM-RS consistently focuses on robot groups to reduce the risk of personal damage or loss of life and to increase efficiency for military operations like reconnaissance, inspection and security.

NM-RS will demonstrate via simulation the benefits of networked multi-robot systems performing autonomously coordinated operations. NM-RS will involve financial and technical advantages through this cooperation on networked multi-robots. This specific project offers advantages with agreed and limited requirements within important European nations. The benefit of this R&D-project is, within the European context, to realize an interoperable simulation environment with open architecture and plug-n-play capability to integrate other and further, detailed robotic relevant software modules. It will deliver an integral framework to simulate multi-robot tasks and missions to save costs before testing with real hardware equipment.

URL:

Funding: European Commission (FP6 IST-045350)

Duration: 1 May 2007 – 30 April 2010.

Partners: Technische Universität Wien, Austria; Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH), Switserland; Austrian Research Centers GmbH, Austria; BlueBotics SA, Switserland; Legrand SA, France; Nestlé Nespresso SA, Switserland; Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH, Germany.

Description: The objective of robots@home is to provide an open mobile platform for the massive introduction of robots into the homes of everyone. The innovations will be: (1) A scaleable, affordable platform in response to the different application scenarios of the four industrial partners: domotics, security, food delivery, and elderly care. (2) An embedded perception system providing multi-modal sensor data for learning and mapping of the rooms and classifying the main items of furniture. (3) A safe and robust navigation method that finally sets the case for using the platform in homes everywhere. The system is tested in four homes and at a large furniture store, e.g., IKEA. Developers as well as lay persons will show the robot around, indicate rooms and furniture and then test the capabilities by commanding to go to the refrigerator or dining table.

URL: http://robsens.acin.tuwien.ac.at/robots_at_home

Funding: European Commission (FP6-IST-045304)

Duration: 1 January 2007 — 28 February 2009

Partners: Fraunhofer - Institut für Produktionstechnik und Automatisierung (IPA), Germany; University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany; Lund University, Sweden; University of Verona, Italy; Visual Components Oy, Finland; GPS Gesellschaft für Produktionssysteme GmbH, Germany; EUnited, Belgium.

Description: The main objectives of RoSta are:

• Action plan for a standard defining activity
• Action plan for a community driven open-source activity
• Gaining international recognition as a standardizing community

URL: http://www.robot-standards.org