2009

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231845)

Partners: Association pour la Recherche et le Developpement des Methodes et Processus Industriels, France; Ministerio de Educacion y Cultura, Uruguay; Universidad de la República, Uruguay; École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant'Anna, Italy; Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universitaet Bonn, Germany, Universitaet Stuttgart, Germany.

Duration: 1 February 2009 – 31 January 2012.

Description: The aim of the ANGELS project is to design and build a prototype of a reconfigurable Anguilliform swimming robot able to split into smaller agents (and vice-versa), each equipped with a bio-inspired "electric sense" used both for recognition of objects and communication between agents. This mode of active perception, present in some fish, is based on the polarisation of certain regions of their body, so generating an electric field flowing through an electroreceptive skin.

URL: http://www.theangelsproject.org

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231940)

Partners: KUKA Roboter GmbH, Germany; GPS Gesellschaft für Produktionssysteme GmbH, Germany; Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., Germany; University of Twente, the Netherlands; Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy; BlueBotics SA, Switzerland.

Duration: 1 March 2009 – 28 February 2013.

Description: BRICS develops a design methodology which focuses on three fundamental major research and development issues, which will be implemented in three highly interwoven lines of technical activities:

• Identification of best practice in robotics hardware and software components.
• Development of a tool chain that supports a rapid and flexible configuration of new robot platforms.
• Cross-sectional activities addressing robust autonomy, system openness, * and harmonization and benchmarking.

URL: http://www.best-of-robotics.org

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231378)

Partners: Jacobs Univerity Bremen, Germany; Universita degli Studi di Genova, Italy; GRAAL Tech SRL, Italy; Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal.

Duration: 1 February 2009 – 31 January 2012.

Description: The aim of the Co3-AUVs project is to develop, implement and test advanced cognitive systems for coordination and cooperative control of multiple AUVs. Several aspects will be investigated including 3D perception and mapping, cooperative situation awareness, deliberation and navigation as well as behavioral control strictly linked with the underwater communication challenges. As a result, the team of AUVs will cooperate in challenging scenarios in the execution of missions where all data is online processed. In doing so, the team will be robust with respect to failures and environmental changes. These key features will be tested in a harbor scenario where additional difficulties with respect to open sea applications arise and in a human diver assistance scenario that also illustrates human robot interaction issues.

URL: http://robotics.jacobs-university.de/projects/Co3-AUVs/

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231864)

Partners: University of Essex, United Kingdom; The Robot Studio, France; Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany; Universitaet Zuerich, Switserland; Elektrotehnicki Fakultet Univerzitet u Beogradu, Serbia.

Duration: 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2011.

Description: Standard humanoid robots mimic the human form, but the mechanisms used in such robots are very different from those in humans, and the characteristics of the robots reflect this. This places severe limitations on the kinds of interactions such robots can engage in, on the knowledge they can acquire of their environment, and therefore on the nature of their cognitive engagement with the environment.

However, a new kind of robot is just beginning to emerge - the anthropomimetic robot. Instead of just copying the outward form of a human, it copies the inner structures and mechanisms - bones, joints, muscles, and tendons, and thus has the potential for human-like action and interaction in the world. Unfortunately, there are as yet no established methods for controlling such robots, nor even for describing their intrinsic movement patterns. This project has three goals: to design and build a robot using anthropomimetic principles; to characterise its dynamics and control it; and to exploit its human-like characteristics to produce some human-like cognitive features.

The consortium already has access to an excellent anthropomimetic torso design; this will be further developed to include significant engineering refinements, and will be mounted on a powered mobile chassis to permit mobile manipulation. Advanced techniques of motion capture and causal analysis will characterise the robot's intrinsic dynamics. Three major approaches to control will then be assessed: classical control theory, the use of physics based internal models, and sensory-motor strategies. These will be combined in a single architecture to cope with different types of tasks, and the consortium will then focus on the use the robot can make of its human-like interaction with the world to begin to cognise the world in a human-like way. Finally, the performance of the robot will be evaluated, both absolutely, and in comparison with the relevant outputs from the EU RobotCub project.

URL: http://eccerobot.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231143)

Partners: Technische Universität München, Germany; Università degli Studi della Basilicata, Italy; Università degli Studi di SalernO, Italy; Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy; Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, Italy; Faculdade Ciencias e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal; Università degli Studi di Cassino, Italy; Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy.

Duration: 1 January 2009 – 30 June 2012.

Description: Within the framework of the ECHORD Project, institutes and research organisations will be given the opportunity to do experiments and to do research using the latest industry-related hardware. Three rounds of open calls for experiments will be carried out over the course of the project duration of 3.5 years, to which all European manufacturers and research groups can submit proposals. It is the declared intention of the project to keep the entry hurdles for potential applicants as low as possible and to attain quantifiable results as quickly as possible.

The experiments can be carried out within one of three scenarios, which build on each other: human-robot co-worker, hyper-flexible manufacturing cells, and cognitive factories. Possible research focuses are human-robot interfacing and safety, robot hands and complex manipulations, mobile manipulators and cooperation, and networked robots.

The experiments can have different orientations: the development of basic technology, the development of applications or feasibility demonstrations. Examples of possible experiments include multimodal human--robot interfacing, high-speed force control for robots, object identification for grip applications, and the synchronized regulation of larger robot groups.

URL: http://www.echord.info

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231888)

Partners: Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg, Germany; University of Oxford, United Kingdom; Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule Zurich, Switzerland; Bluebotics SA, Switzerland; Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

Duration: 2 March 2009 – 1 March 2012

Description: In the field of robotics, there has recently been a tremendous progress in the development of autonomous robots that offer various services to their users. Typical services include support of elderly people, cleaning, transportation, and delivery tasks, exploration of inaccessible hazardous environments, or surveillance. Most of the systems developed so far, however, are restricted to indoor scenarios, non-urban outdoor environments, or road usage with cars. The goal of the EUROPA project is to bridge this gap and to develop the foundations for service robots designed to autonomously navigate in urban environments outdoors as well as in shopping malls and shops to provide various services to users including guidance, delivery, and transportation. EUROPA will develop and apply sophisticated probabilistic scene interpretation techniques to deal with the unpredictable and changing environments. Based on data gathered with its sensors, the robot will acquire a detailed model of the environment, detect and track moving objects in the environment, adapt its navigation behaviour according to the current situation and communicate with its users in a natural way, even remotely. EUROPA is targeted at developing novel technologies that will open new perspectives for commercial applications of service robots in the future.

URL: http://europa.informatik.uni-freiburg.de

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231451)

Partners: Università Campus Bio-Medico, Italy; Technische Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands; Universiteit Twente, The Netherlands; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne, Switzerland; Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy.

Duration: 1 February 2009 – 31 January 2012

Description: The goal of the EVRYON project is to develop a novel approach for the design of Wearable Robots (WRs), e.g. exoskeletons, prostheses and other wearable mechatronic devices that can be used for a variety of applications, such as rehabilitation, personal assistance, human augmentation and more. Ideal solutions for such systems should aim at the optimal trade-off between performance, i.e. the level of assistance to be provided to the end-user, and some critical requirements, such as minimal weight and dimensions, low energy consumption and several other factors that can significantly affect the effectiveness and efficiency of WRs.

URL: http://www.biorobotics.it/evryon.html

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231495)

Partners: Tallinna Tehnikaulikool, Estonia; Universita degli Studi di Verona, Italy; Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy; Rigas Tehniska Universitate, Latvia; University of Bath, United Kingdom.

Duration: 1 February 2009 – 31 January 2012

Description: The overall aim of FILOSE is acquiring a deeper understanding of the principles underlying fish locomotion and sensing, in order to develop new technologies for underwater vehicles on the basis of biological evidence. More specifically, FILOSE focuses on shedding light on how fish exploit lateral line sensing in underwater environments.

URL: http://www.biorobotics.ttu.ee/tikiwiki_filose/

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231640)

Partners: Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, France; Shadow Robot Company, United Kingdom; Orebro University, Sweden; Universitaet Hamburg, Germany; Commissariat Energie Atomique CEA, France; King's College London, United Kingdom; Faculdade Ciencias e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain; Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal.

Duration: 2 February 2009 – 1 February 2013

Description:
The HANDLE project aims at understanding how humans perform the manipulation of objects in order to replicate grasping and skilled in-hand movements with an anthropomorphic artificial hand, and thereby move robot grippers from current best practice towards more autonomous, natural and effective articulated hands. The project implies not only focusing on technological developments but also working with fundamental multidisciplinary research aspects in order to endow the robotic hand system with advanced perception capabilities, high level feedback control and elements of intelligence that allow recognition of objects and context, reasoning about actions and a high degree of recovery from failure during the execution of dexterous tasks.

Integrating findings from disciplines such as neuroscience, developmental psychology, cognitive science, robotics, multimodal perception and machine learning, the method we will develop is based on an original blend of learning and predicting behaviours from imitation and "babbling" to allow the robot to be capable of responding to gaps in its knowledge.

URL: http://www.handle-project.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231724)

Partners: Italian Institute of Technology, Italty; Aalborg University, Denmark; Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri Clinica del Lavoro e della Riabilitazione, Italy; Eberhard-Karls-Universitat Tubingen, Germany; Forschungsgesellschaft fur Arbeitphysiologie und Arbeitsschutz e.V., Germany; Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, United Kingdom.

Duration: 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2011

Description: The project aims at investigating and developing efficient robot strategies to facilitate the acquisition of motor skills. We will address both the (human) trainee and the (robot) trainer sides, by combining behavioural studies on motor learning and its neural correlates with design, implementation, and validation of robot agents that behave as ‘optimal’ trainers, which efficiently exploit structure and plasticity of the human sensorimotor systems.

URL: http://www.humourproject.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231722)

Partners: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy; Universita Campus Bio Medico di Roma, Italy; Stiftung Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany; Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland; University of Sheffield, United Kingdom; Aberystwyth University, United Kingdom; University of Ulster, United Kingdom.

Duration: 1 January 2009 – 30 April 2013

Description: IM-Clever aims to develop a new methodology for designing robots controllers that can:

1. cumulatively learn new efficient skills through autonomous development based on intrinsic motivations, and
2. reuse such skills for accomplishing multiple, complex, and externally-assigned tasks.

URL: http://www.im-clever.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231688)

Partners: Universitaet Zuerich, Switzerland; Ryerson University, Canada; École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland; University of Antwerp, Belgium; University of Southern Denmark, Denmark; Friedrich-Schiller Universitaet Jena, Germany.

Duration: 1 February 2009 – 31 January 2013

Description: Locomorph's goal is to push beyond the state of the art in robotic locomotion and movements, by increasing efficiency, robustness, and thus usability in unknown environments. As robotic research and industry are competing to increase robots' usability towards the highly-in-demand service robotics, advancements in robotic locomotion today would give Europe a significant competitive advantage. Locomorph combines multidisciplinary approaches from biology, biomechanics, neuroscience, robotics, and embodied intelligence to investigate locomotion and movements in animals and robots, focusing on two concepts: morphology and morphosis. We will build many diverse robots using heterogeneous modules to explore various morphological factors (shape, materials, sensors, compliance, etc) and sensory-motor control strategies, in order to generate novel and optimal robotic designs which exploit the physical dynamics emerging from the interaction among the physical morphology, control, and environment.

URL: http://www.locomorph.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-GALILEO-227824)

Partners: Nav On Time, France; Belrobotics, Belgium; Università di Catania, Italy.

Duration: 1 January 2009 – 30 June 2010

Description: The priority objective of the MOW-BY-SAT project is to support the development of a GNSS based navigation and guidance system to be integrated into an autonomous lawnmower, paving the way for industrialisation and commercialisation of GNSS applications oriented to domestic service robot, operating outdoor.

Up to now, GNSS technologies are not much used in robotic applications. Beyond this concrete application the project aims to increase the adoption of the GNSS technologies towards robotics application, in a relation M2MM (Machine to Mobile Machine). In this context the project will study the benefits of European GNSS (EGNOS and Galileo).

URL: http://www.mow-by-sat.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231608)

Partners: Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant'Anna, Italy; University of Reading, United Kingdom; Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece; Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; Weizzman Institute of Science, Israel; Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy; Universitaet Zuerich, Switzerland.

Duration: 1 February 2009 – 31 January 2013

Description: The grand challenge is investigating and understanding the principles that give rise to the octopus sensory-motor capabilities and at incorporating them in new design approaches and ICT and robotics technologies to build an embodied artefact, based broadly on the anatomy of the 8-arm body of an octopus, and with similar performance in water, in terms of dexterity, speed, control, flexibility, and applicability.

The new technologies expected to result from the IP concern actuation (soft actuators), sensing (distributed flexible tactile sensors), control and robot architectures (distributed control, coordination of many dof), materials (variable stiffness), mechanisms (soft-bodied hydrostat structures), kinematics models. The final robotic octopus prototype will be capable of locomotion on different substrates, of squeezing into small apertures, of dextrous manipulation by coordinating the eight arms, of anchoring in order to exert forces on external environment; of controlling a flexible structure with virtually infinite dof.

URL: http://www.octopus-project.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231500)

Partners: Universita degli Studi di Genova, Italy; TechOnYou Srl, Italy; University of Wales Newport, United Kingdom; University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom; Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy; Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Universita degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy.

Duration: 1 May 2009 – 30 April 2012

Description: This project will develop and demonstrate a range of new robot capabilities based on robot skin tactile feedback from large areas of the robot body. An investigation of these issues until now has been limited by the lack of tactile sensing technologies enabling large scale experimental activities, since so far skin technologies and embedded tactile sensors have been mostly demonstrated only at prototype stage. The new capabilities will improve the ability of robots to operate effectively and safely in unconstrained environments and also their ability to communicate and co-operate with each other and with humans.

URL: http://www.roboskin.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248366)

Partners: Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant'Anna, Italy; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal; Waseda University, Japan

Duration: 1 December 2009 – 30 November 2012

Description: The objective of this project is to investigate new neuroscience-based approaches to the design and development of humanoi robots with advanced perception and action capabilities,showing robust, adaptive,predictive and efective behaviour in the real world. The proposed new approaches to the design of humanoid robots are strongly based on the concept of human's sense of movement.

URL: http://www.robosom.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-230902)

Partners: ABB AB, Sweden; Lunds Universitet, Sweden; Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung E.V. Germany; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany; Dynamore Gesellschaft für FEM Ingenieurleistungen MBH, Germany; ABB AG, Germany.

Duration: 2 March 2009 – 2 March 2013.

Description: ROSETTA develops “human-centric” technology for industrial robots that will not only appear more human-like, but also cooperate with workers in ways that are safe and perceived as natural. Such robots will be programmed in an intuitive and efficient manner, making it easier to adapt them to new tasks when a production line is changed to manufacture a new product.

The project will address the challenges by developing methods to engineer and program robot systems in ways that are more intuitive, more related to the task, and less specific to the installation. This will require robots to be able to execute tasks more autonomously, without the need for detailed description of every step, and will lead to a significant reduction in programming effort. Once programmed, the robots will use sensor-based learning to autonomously improve their abilities (“skills”) to perform the task quickly, quite like a human worker. When the operation is optimised in this way, the robot shares the knowledge of how to best perform the operation with other robots by sending the parameters over a network to a central server. Other robots do the same, which results in a quick build-up of production knowledge (“cumulative learning”).
Storing and sharing production-related data will make use of latest techniques developed for the Web 2.0, representing such data as form of “knowledge” that can be accumulated, enhanced and re-used by a population of robots.

The production scenario that involves robots and humans working side-by-side and interacting safely requires that design, control and supervision devices and methods are found for robots to be harmless, and to act in a way that humans anticipate and feel comfortable with. This involves developing human-like motion patterns, speech interaction as well as avoidance of any situations that may pose a hazard or uncomfortable situation to human workers or operators. The human and machine cooperation will be supervised by a multi-level sensor system involving different sensor types and a reasoning unit that will analyse the robot environment and give the robot instructions in real-time how to adjust to changing environments and to human presence.

URL: http://www.fp7rosetta.org

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231855)

Partners: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland; Ascending Technologies GMBH, Germany; Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, France; Technical University of Crete, Greece; CSEM Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique SA, Switzerland.

Duration: 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2011

Description: Autonomous micro helicopters are about to play major roles in tasks like reconnaissance for search and rescue, environment monitoring, security surveillance, inspection, law enforcement, etc. The ability to fly allows easily avoiding obstacles on the ground and to have an excellent bird's eye view. Therefore flying robots are the logical heir of ground based mobile robots. Its navigational and hovering advantages make them the ideal platform for exploration, mapping and monitoring tasks. If they are further realized in small scale, they can also be used in narrow out- and indoor environment and they represent only a limited risk for the environment and people living in it. However, for such operations today's systems navigating on GPS information only are not sufficient any more.

Fully autonomous operation in cities or other dense environments requires the micro helicopter to fly at low altitude or indoors where GPS signals are often shadowed and to actively explore unknown environments while avoiding collisions and creating maps. This involves a number of challenges on all levels of helicopter design, perception, actuation, control, navigation and power supply that have yet to be solved.

URL: http://projects.asl.ethz.ch/sfly

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231576)

Partners: Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany; Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland; Universite Paris Diderot, France; University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; UNIVERSITE PARIS DESCARTES, France; Technische Universiteit Delft, the Netherlands; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France.

Duration: 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2011

Description: The goal of the proposed study is to equip a highly biomimetic robot hand-arm system with the agility, robustness and versatility that are hallmarks of the human motor system by understanding and mimicking the variable stiffness paradigms that are so effectively employed by the human CNS. A key component of the study will be the anatomically accurate musculoskeletal modelling of the human arm and hand. The project will develop novel methodologies to comprehend how the human arm can adapt its impedance, e.g. by changing the co-contraction level or by adapting the reflex gains. The impedance of the arm and of the hand will be investigated using powerful robot manipulators capable of imposing force perturbations.

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

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-231554)

Partners: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany; Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; Imperial College, United Kingdom; Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy; Università di Pisa, Italy; Universiteit Twente, the Netherlands.

Duration: 1 February 2009 – 31 January 2012

Description: VIACTORS addresses the development and use of safe, energy-efficient and highly dynamic variable impedance actuation systems which will permit the embodiment of natural characteristics found in biological systems into the structures of a new generation of mechatronic systems. The main sought advantage is that of incorporating the intended behaviours of the machine into its own physics, to the maximum extent possible. This will not only save computational and communication bandwidth for controlling the robot motion – a concern of not trivial nature for tasks involving physical dynamics, where reaction times of the order of a millisecond may make the difference between safe and deadly, efficient and inefficient, or adaptive and coercitive. It will also make it possible to shape the behaviour so as to match the task with finer time granularity than it was possible in the past – just like the natural example teaches us. And, perhaps most importantly, to prepare a physical substrate for the interface with the higher levels of (cognitive) intelligence which will provide for smooth integration of functionalities – in a way not too dissimilar from the biological roles of different neural systems. The project will consider interfaces with higher-level control for both artificial cognitive robotic systems, and humans through brain-machine interfaces that are subject of concurrent studies by some of our partners. This advance in technology will pave the way towards new application fields, such as industrial co-workers, household robots, advanced prostheses and rehabilitation devices, and autonomous robots for exploration of space and remote planets. Therefore, results of this project will deeply impact applications where successful task completion requires people and robots to collaborate directly in a shared workspace or robots to move autonomously and as efficiently as humans. 

URL: http://www.viactors.org