2010

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248669)

Partners: Universita di Bologna, Italy; Alstom Inspection Robotics, Switzerland; ETH Zurich, Switzerland; Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy; Universiteit Twente, The Netherlands

Duration: 1 February 2010 – 31 January 2013.

Description: The goal of AIRobots is to develop a new generation of aerial service robots capable to support human beings in activities which require a robot to be able to interact actively and safely with environments, not being constrained to the ground but, indeed, operating freely in the air. The step forward, with respect to
the classical field of aerial robotics, is to develop aerial vehicles able to handle a wide variety of applications, such as inspection of buildings and large infrastructures, picking of environmental samples, aerial remote manipulation, etc.

The starting point for the project is an aerial platform whose aeromechanical configuration allows the vehicle to interact with the environment in a non- destructive way and to hover close to operating points. Rotary-wing aerial vehicles with shrouded propellers comprise the basic airframes which will be then equipped with appropriate robotic end-effectors and sensors in order to transform the platform into an aerial service robot, i.e. a system able to fly and to achieve robotic tasks.

Advanced automatic control algorithms will be conceived to govern the aerial platform, which will be remotely supervised by the operator through the use of haptic devices. Particular emphasis will be put on developing advanced human-in-the-loop and autonomous navigation control strategies relying upon a cooperative and adaptive interaction between the on-board automatic control and the remote operator. Force- and visual feedback strategies will be investigated in order to transform the aerial platform into a "flying hand" suitable for aerial manipulation.

Prototypes of aerial service robots will be developed and tested in industrial scenarios, on tasks such as docking and undocking from structures, cleaning, inspection and repair of infrastructures, payload lifting and other operations requiring safe interaction between the aerial platform and the environment.

URL: http://www.airobots.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248116)

Partners: University of Plymouth, United Kingdom; Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, Germany; Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, The Netherlands; Imperial College, United Kingdom; University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom; National Research Council Padova, Italy; San Raffaele del Monte Tabor hospital, Italy; Gostai, France

Duration: 1 March 2010 – 31 August 2014.

Description: The goal of ALIZ-E is to develop novel methods for developing and testing interactive, mobile robots which will be able to socially interact with human users over extended periods of time, i.e. a possibly non-continuous succession of interactions which can refer back to, and build forth on, previous experiences. To achieve this aim, ALIZ-E will address three related issues in developing interactive robots capable of self-sustaining medium- to long-term autonomous operation in real-world indoor environments. One, ALIZ-E will address how long-term experience can be acquired, to ground actions and interactions not only categorically in sensori-motoric experience, but also spatiotemporally. Two, ALIZ-E will address how a system can deal robustly with inevitable differences in quality in perceiving and understanding a user and her environment. To this end, ALIZ-E will develop novel methods for adaptively controlling how a system invokes and balances a hybrid ensemble of processing methods for perception, action and interaction, and level(s) of understanding these will build up, to maintain sustainable interaction with a user. Third, ALIZ-E will address how a system can adapt its interaction based on how user behavior changes over time and contexts.

URL: http://www.aliz-e.org

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248311)

Partners: Universitaet Bielefeld, Germany; EPFL, Switzerland; Technische Universitaet Graz, Austria; Fondazione Santa Lucia, Italy; Universiteit Gent, Belgium; Eberhard Karls Universitaet Tuebingen, Germany; Universitaet Zuerich, Switzerland; Fondazione Istituto Italiano de Tecnologia, Italy; Jacobs University Bremen, Germany; Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

Duration: 1 January 2010 – 31 December 2014.

Description: Compared with animals and humans, the motor skills of today's robots still must be regarded as poor. AMARSi aims at making a qualitative leap towards achieving biological richness in robotic motor skills. The project will address:

• coordinated and simultaneous development of compliant mechanics, pervasive learning and dynamical-systems based control architectures;
• mutually informed research in human motor behaviour and robotics;
• reliance on compliant mechanics and morphological computing for flexibility, computational and motoric speed, safety and damage-robust learning;
• novel learning paradigms drawing from principles of reservoir computing;
• control architectures based on dynamical (neural) systems throughout, also on the higher cognitive levels, etc.

Robotic demonstration will be based on a compliant version of the iCUB robot and a compliant quadruped Cheetah platform. The robots will engage in an interaction with a human caretaker at the level of a young child playing an open-ended game in a cluttered and rough environment. Hardware and software solutions will be made publicly available as open source. Ultimately, the naturalness of such compliant robots will allow them to blend into everyday life.

URL: http://amarsi-project.eu

Funding: European Commission ()

Partners: Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany; FerRobotics Compliant Robot Technology GmbH, Austria; Loewe AG, Germany; MRK-Systeme GmbH, Germany; PROFACTOR GmbH, Austria; Tekniker, Spain; VTT, Finland.

Duration: 1 July 2010 – 30 June 2013.

Description: The project aims at developing and integrating a scalable and flexible packaging assistant that aids human workers while packaging mid- to upper-sized and mostly heavy goods. Electronic consumer goods, e.g. TV sets, have a large number of variants and are packaged manually. Only in single-variant production lines with high lot sizes, automation of the packaging step has been introduced. However, automating the packaging process will decrease the production cycle time and costs also for mixed variant production lines, thus allowing that several production lines can be merged to a reduced number of flexible packaging stations. This also allows optimisation with regard to the actual demands of the various goods (i.e. number of items produced per day). To achieve the realisation of these challenging goals for a highly flexible packaging station, CustomPacker will bring together the highly adaptable skills of a human worker with the precision and ability of robots to carry heavy goods. The main goal of CustomPacker is to design and assemble a packaging workstation mostly using standard hardware components resulting in a universal handling system for different products. Ideally one setup for packaging a high variety of products and components can be implemented, which can be achieved by a teachable system architecture. This will open a new dimension in how industrial robots are deployed today, namely the collaboration of human workers with robot co-workers. Only by driving reliability and precision of today’s available technology to the limit and by additionally forcing the use of highly sophisticated software modules for worker detection and intention recognition, the cycle times can be reduced to justify the investment costs for additional complexity.


URL: http://www.custompacker.eu

Funding: European Commission ()

Partners: Wageningen UR, the Netherlands; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Ben-Gurion University, Israel; University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; UMEA University, Sweden; Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy; CSIC, Inst. de Automatica Industrial, Spain; Technical University Munich, Germany; Case New Holland NV, Belgium; INIA PROGAP, Chile; Force-A, France; Festo, Germany; Swedish Univ. of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden; Jentjens Machinetechniek, the Netherlands.

Duration: 1 October 2010 – 30 September 2014.

Description: CROPS will develop scientific know-how for a highly configurable, modular and clever carrier platform that includes modular parallel manipulators and intelligent tools (sensors, algorithms, sprayers, grippers) that can be easily installed onto the carrier and are capable of adapting to new tasks and conditions. Several technological demonstrators will be developed for high value crops like greenhouse vegetables, fruits in orchards, and grapes for premium wines. The CROPS robotic platform will be capable of site-specific spraying (targets spray only towards foliage and selective targets) and selective harvesting of fruit (detects the fruit, determines its ripeness, moves towards the fruit, grasps it and softly detaches it). Another objective of CROPS is to develop techniques for reliable detection and classification of obstacles and other objects to enable successful autonomous navigation and operation in plantations and forests. The agricultural and forestry applications share many research areas, primarily regarding sensing and learning capabilities.

URL: http://www.crops-robots.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248552)

Partners: KUKA Roboter, Germany; EUnited, Belgium; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy; R.U.Robots, United Kingdom; Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung, Germany; GPS Gesellschaft fur Produktionssysteme, Germany; Fatronik Tecnalia, Spain; Commissariat Energie Atomique (CEA), France; Alenia Aeronautica, Italy; Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany

Duration: 1 March 2010 – 28 February 2013.

Description: euRobotics aims to improve cooperation between industry and academia and enhance public perception of (European) robotics. It will build on successful coordination activities which have been undertaken over the past few years within the academic and industrial robotics communities, in particular through EURON and EUROP, by following a policy of targeted stimulation of grass-roots initiatives that both communities have already experimented with. To help the two communities to communicate more efficiently, the project will develop a common terminology and a common perception of the state of the art. euRobotics will also create a high-level education and training initiative for both PhD students in robotics and R&D engineers in robotics companies. It will encourage academia to demonstrate their abilities in industrially relevant challenges and competitions. Last, but not least, the CA will help to ensure that technological developments will reach the market not only through existing channels, but also through newly established companies. euRobotics will provide coordinated communication channels aiming at both the general public and professional audiences, including national funding bodies, and representatives from neighbouring technology and market domains, such as cognitive science, mechatronics, automotive, aerospace, security, computer vision, and embedded control systems. The CA will also address ethical, legal and societal topics as well as market and standards­related issues

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

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248258)

Partners: Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg, Germany; Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas; Greece; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Instituto Superior Teecnico, Portugal; Fraunhofer Institute IAIS, Germany; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Technische Universtät Berlin, Germany; KUKA Roboter GmbH, Germany

Duration: 1 February 2010 – 1 August 2013.

Description: The development of flexible mobile manipulation systems is a promising area for the robotics industry as it allows to combine the success of manipulation robots with the flexibility of mobile robots. In the past, there has been a tremendous success in the areas of robotic manipulators and mobile robots. Many industrial processes highly depend on the reliability and robustness of robotic manipulators. On the other hand, research on mobile robots has led to systems that demonstrated the capability of safe and accurate navigation. The goal of this project is to integrate these two areas in the context of a real-world application scenario to build the basis for a new generation of autonomous mobile manipulation robots that can flexibly be instructed to perform complex manipulation and transportation tasks. The project will develop a novel robot programming environment that allows even non-expert users to specify complex manipulation tasks in real-world environments. In addition to a task specification language, the environment includes concepts for probabilistic inference and for learning manipulation skills from demonstration and from experience. The project will build upon and extend recent results in robot programming, navigation, manipulation, perception, learning by instruction, and statistical relational learning to develop advanced technology for mobile manipulation robots that can flexibly be instructed even by non-expert users to perform challenging manipulation tasks in real-world environments. The First-MM manipulation system will, starting from a task specification, be capable of acquiring necessary low-level manipulation skills, imitating mobile manipulation behaviors demonstrated by a human it interacts with and, most importantly, will be able to generalize over such demonstrated behaviors to autonomously solve other tasks.

URL: http://www.first-mm.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248273)

Partners: Forschungszentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany; Örebro University, Sweden; University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; Max-Planck Institute, Germany.

Duration: 1 March 2010 – 28 February 2013.

Description: In order to work naturally in human environments such as offices and homes, robots of the future will need to be much more flexible and robust in the face of novelty than those of today. In GeRT we will develop new methods to cope with novelty in manipulation tasks. Humans cope so seamlessly with novel objects that we do not think of grasping a new cup, or screwing the lid off a jar we haven't seen before as challenging. But this kind of everyday novelty in manipulation tasks is hard for a robot. Currently the most advanced robots can perform a task such as making a drink, which involves grasping, pouring, and twisting off a cap from a jar. But the rules for how to pick up every single object must be programmed. All of this means that if robots are ever going to be useful in natural settings where manipulation is involved that they need ways of generalising on the fly to cope with novel objects, and perhaps novel tasks. Our approach is to take a small set of existing robot programs, for a certain robot manipulation task, such as serving a drink and to give the robot the ability to adapt them to a novel version of the task. These programs constitute a database of prototypes representing that class of task. When confronted with a novel instance of the same task the robot needs to establish appropriate correspondences between objects and actions in the prototypes and their counterparts in the novel scenario. In this way the robot can solve a task that is physically substantially different but similar at an abstract level. To achieve this we will use a variety of techniques from machine perception, machine learning, and artificial intelligence techniques such as automated planning.

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

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-247525)

Partners: Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique INRIA, France; The Czech Technical University, Czech Republic; Aldebaran Robotics, France; IDIAP Research Institute, Switzerland; Bielefeld University, Germany

Duration: 1 February 2010 – 31 January 2013.

Description: Humanoids which are expected to collaborate with people should be able to interact with them in the most natural way possible. This involves significant perceptual, communication, and motor processes, operating in a coordinated fashion. Consider a social gathering scenario where a humanoid is expected to possess certain social skills. It should be able to explore a populated space, localize people and determine their status, decide to join one or two persons, synthesize appropriate behaviour, and engage in dialogue with them. Humans appear to solve these tasks routinely by integrating the often complementary information provided by multi sensory data processing, from low-level 3D object positioning to high-level gesture recognition and dialogue handling. Understanding the world on the basis of unrestricted sensorial data, recognizing people's intentions and behaving like them are extremely challenging problems. The objective of HUMAVIPS is to endow humanoid robots with audiovisual abilities like exploration, recognition and interaction, so that they exhibit adequate behaviour when dealing with a group of people. Planned research and technological development during the project will emphasize the role played by multimodal perception within principled models of human-robot interaction and of humanoid behaviour. An adequate architecture will implement auditory and visual skills on a fully programmable humanoid robot. An open-source software platform will be developed to foster dissemination and to ensure exploitation of the results beyond the lifetime of the project.

URL: http://humavips.inrialpes.fr

Funding: European Commission (FP7-Interreg 4A)

Partners: Danish Technological Institute, Denmark; Syddansk Universitet, Denmark; Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany.

Duration: 2010 – 2013.

Description: The Project aims at:

• bundling expertise within computer vision and robotics across the Danish-German border and supplying a competence center that links to industry as well as research and educational centers in the region
• producing scientific knowledge about the manipulation of non-rigid bodies, so that such products can be handled in manufacturing processes in agriculture, meat production and cloth manufacturing, amongst others
• developing and using a framework for adaptive robot vision systems that are able to adapt and to learn robot actions in the domains described above.
• developing a prototype robot vision platform in which different kinds of non-rigid objects (clothes, agricultural products, etc.) can be handled.
• making the robot/vision platform accessible to companies (small and large and within different market segments) that have a demand for handling non-rigid bodies.

The progress achieved in robot handling within the last decade has mainly had its focus on rigid and geometrically well defined parts and objects.

A very large part of the production and handling of parts and objects are categorized as non-well-defined geometric objects, called ‘non-rigid bodies’ or ‘flexible objects’, and they are found within business areas such as garden farming of fruit and vegetables, laundries and cloth manufacturing etc. These significant industries have a demand for new technology. The development of a combination of accessible soft- and hardware is within reach, so a successful combination has been made possible.

In this project our aim is to develop a robot platform which is able to grasp and manipulate non-rigid objects and to act in relation to experience achieved by memorizing.

This will be achieved by:

• extracting 3D information in real-time and guiding the extraction process through modeling dynamic structures of non-rigid objects.
• connecting grasping movements to these dynamic structures * offering a multiple handling option, where the functionality are to be controlled by visually or tactile feed-back.
• an efficient storage of data that the robot has learned.

The platform will then be made accessible to companies that have a demand for handling of non-rigid bodies.

URL: http://www.interreg-robot.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248314)

Partners: Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany; Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland; Universitaet Salzburg, Austria; KunGLIGA Tekniska Hoegskolan, Sweden; ACCREA Bartlomiej Stanczyk, Poland

Duration: 1 January 2010 – 31 December 2013.

Description: The inability to cope with abstract commands confines today's robots to very constrained, well-controlled environments. To overcome these limitations, a priori knowledge preprogrammed or learned is required. However, as objectives and situations may radically change over time there will always be knowledge gaps. Even if provided with sophisticated cognitive capabilities, sufficient information will not always be available in the environment to fill these gaps. Humans, however, are a rich source of information to be utilized, e.g. by asking for directions. Access to this source provides robots with a powerful means to improve its adaptability and cope with new situations as they arise. The IURO project explores the integration of information retrieval from humans into robot control architectures to complement their perception and action control capabilities. IURO follows a multi-disciplinary approach combining environment perception, communication, navigation, knowledge representation and assessment, and human factors studies as well as a novel robot platform for human-centred urban environments as a pre-industrial development. IURO focuses on several key aspects: perception and appropriate representation of dynamic urban environments; identification of knowledge gaps arising from dynamically changing situations and contexts not specified a priori; retrieval of missing information from humans in a natural way by pro-actively approaching them and initiating communication situations. Quantitative and comparative benchmark measures considering flexibility and robustness with respect to navigation and interaction capabilities in real-world scenarios are developed. IURO targets novel technologies for new commercial service robots with improved flexibility and dependability.

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

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-)

Partners: Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Instituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy; Maccabi Healthcare Services, Israel; CEIT RALTEC gemeinnuetzige GmbH, Austria; Vienna University of Technology, Austria; Consoft sistemi S.p.A., Italy; Universität Hamburg, Germany

Duration: 1 February 2010 – 31 January 2013.

Description: Intelligent home environments are one of the key facets to counterbalance the reduced number of caretakers and increase the QoL of elderly. In the KSERA project the aim is to seamlessly integrate smart home technology with socially assistive robots.
&&&The main research question addressed in this project is how to obtain a successful, effective interaction between the human and the mobile robot to guarantee acceptance and adoption of service robotics technology and offer added value of the ubiquitous monitoring services.

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

Funding: European Commission (FP7-NMP-260101)

Partners: PROFACTOR GmbH, Austria Audi AG, Germany; Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom; Hochschule Ingolstadt, Germany; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; FerRobotics Compliant Robot Technology GmbH, Austria; Festo AG, Germany; Ridgeback sas, Italy; Visual Components Oy, Finland.

Duration: 1 August 2010 – 31 July 2013.

Description: The European automotive industry and their component manufacturers are facing the biggest shift in their history. The transition from combustion engines to electric drives (e-vehicle) requires pro-duction facilities that can initially deal with low and varying production volumes and can quickly be up-scaled to large numbers at need. LOCOBOT provides a solution to this problem by developing a flexible robotic assistant platform to support manual production processes and increase the produc-tivity and precision of such tasks. LOCOBOT does not only include the robot itself but also the en-gineering tools that are required for quickly building the robot, setting up its control structure and defining its tasks. Facing the demographic change, a further goal of LOCOBOT is the improvement of ergonomics in industrial production processes. A group of key players in the automotive industry, in automation components, advanced robots and engineering software will be supported by a group of excellent researchers to solve the technical and scientific challenges in LOCOBOT.

The results will be demonstrated by setting up 3 typical and highly relevant use cases in a pilot production line of Audi AG. The automotive industry will benefit from LOCOBOT by having a robot assistant that can be quickly reconfigured in terms of its kinematic structure as well as its tasks. This allows them to make manual production processes much more efficient, to quickly up-scale a production process if re-quired and to improve working conditions by reducing the need to lift heavy objects (such as wheel hub drives for the e-vehicle). This will enable the industry to achieve a leading position in the the e-vehicle market and to keep up with the expected customer demand. The immediate impact (2-5 years) of LOCOBOT will be about 150 MEur in savings due to increased flexibility and efficiency, and will be 10 times as much in the following years depending on how the production numbers of the e-vehicle evolve.

URL: http://www.locobot.eu

Funding: European Commission ()

Partners: 35 partners.

Duration: 1 March 2010 – 28 July 2013.

Description: to Provide European industry with new leading-edge innovation that will enable the production of advanced robust and safe cognitive, reasoning autonomous and co-operative robotic systems at reduced cost.

URL: http://www.r3-cop.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248873)

Partners: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg, Germany; PROFACTOR GMBH, Austria; HMC International, Belgium; Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland; Permobil AB, Sweden; Windekind VZW Centrum voor buitengewone zorg, Belgium; Nationaal Multiple Sclerose Centrum, Belgium

Duration: 1 August 2010 – 31 July 2013.

Description: RADHAR will develop a driving assistance system involving environment perception, driver perception and modelling, and robot decision making. RADHAR proposes a framework to seamlessly fuse the inherently uncertain information from both environment perception and the driver's steering signals by estimating the trajectory the robot should execute, and to adopt this fused information for safe navigation with a level of autonomy adjusted to the user's capabilities and desires. This requires lifelong, unsupervised but safe learning by the robot. As a consequence, a continuous interaction between two learning systems (the robot and the user) will emerge, hence Robotic ADaptation to Humans Adapting to Robots (RADHAR). The framework will be demonstrated on a robotic wheelchair platform that navigates in an everyday environment with everyday objects. RADHAR targets as main scientific outcomes: online 3D perception combining laser scanners and vision with traversability analysis of the terrain; novel paradigm for fusing environment and user perception and for safe robot navigation.

URL: http://www.radhar.eu

Funding: European Commission (CP-IP 245986-2)

Partners: Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Spain; Soluciones Agricolas de Precision, Spain; Cyberbotics, Switzerland; COGVIS Software und Consulting, Austria; BlueBotics SA , Switzerland; Centre National du Machinisme Agricole, du Genie Rural, des Eaux et des Forets, France; Airrobot GMBH, Germany; Tropical S.A., Greece; CNH Belgium NV, Belgium; Universita di Pisa, Italy; Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; C.M. SRL, Italy; FTW Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation, Austria; Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain; Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.

Duration: 1 August 2010 – 31 July 2014.

Description: In the last two decades, a precise management of agricultural land has been made possible due to the availability of new technologies, including global positioning systems (GPS), geographic information systems (GIS), sensors, automation of agricultural machinery, and high resolution image sensing. As a result, the concept of Precision Agriculture has emerged as the management strategy that uses information technologies to collect and process data from multiple sources in order to facilitate decisions associated with crop production. Moreover, the EU's sixth environmental action programme addresses the need to encourage farmers to change their use of plant protection products .

RHEA is focused on the design, development, and testing of a new generation of automatic and robotic systems for both chemical and physical mechanical and thermal effective weed management focused on both agriculture and forestry, and covering a large variety of European products including agriculture wide row crops (processing tomato, maize, strawberry, sunflower and cotton), close row crops (winter wheat and winter barley) and forestry woody perennials (walnut trees, almond trees, olive groves and multipurpose open woodland). RHEA aims at diminishing the use of agricultural chemical inputs in a 75%, improving crop quality, health and safety for humans, and reducing production costs by means of sustainable crop management using a fleet of small, heterogeneous robots ground and aerial equipped with advanced sensors, enhanced end-effectors and improved decision control algorithms. RHEA can be considered as a cooperative robotic system, falling within an emerging area of research and technology with a large number of applications as reported by the FP6 Network of Excellence EURON, Special Interest Group on Cooperative Robotics, funded by the European Commission.

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

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248942)

Partners: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands; Philips Applied Technologies, The Netherlands; University of Stuttgart, Germany; Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland; University of Zaragoza, Spain Technische Universität München, Germany

Duration: 1 January 2010 – 31 December 2013.

Description: At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment.

Bringing a new meaning to the phrase "experience is the best teacher", the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.

URL: http://roboearth.org

Funding: European Commission (FP7-2010-NMP-ICT-FoF 260159)

Partners: Fundacion Tekniker, Spain; Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy; Instituto Tecnologico del Calzado y Conexas, Italy; Comau SPA, Italy; Robotnik Automation SLL, Spain; QDesign S.R.L., Italy; Automatica y Control Numerico SL., Spain; Pikolinos Intercontinental S.A., Italy; Rotta S.R.L., Italy; Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GMBH, Germany.

Duration: 1 September 2010 – 28 February 2013.

Description: Footwear production is still mainly handcrafted. Currently, opposite to other manufacturing sectors like automotive, food or metal processing, robots are not used in the footwear industry. Only technical shoe producers have introduced robots to assist in the injection moulding process, but other relevant applications are still not in use. The introduction of robotics in this industry will contribute to overcoming complexity in processes automation that may lead to shortest production runs.

To achieve this objective the consortium aims to research and develop:

• New manipulation strategies and devices for non-rigid parts that allow grasping, handling and packaging shoes without damaging them;
• Sensor-based robot programming and control tools that use information from the CAD system and available sensors, in particular vision sensors, for visual servoing, allowing easy programming of flexible robotic applications;
• The re-design of shoe production processes for robot-assisted manufacturing and assembly, in areas such as selective heating, visual inspection and packaging.

The project will further address six operations in shoe manufacturing that are most suitable for short-to-medium term introduction of robotics in this sector. They will be used in three prototypes that will be scheduled throughout the 30-month duration of the project in such a way that, from the beginning, the footwear industry becomes aware of potential applications and the benefits of robotics.

URL: http://www.robofoot.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248960)

Partners: Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy; Fondazione Centro
San Raffaele del Monte Tabor, Italy; Tallinn University of Technology,
Estonia; Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany; Karlsruhe
Institute of Technology, Germany; School of Pedagogical and Technological
Education, Greece; World Health Organisation, Switzerland; Ecole
Polytechniques Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Holografika, Hungary;
Force Dimension, Switzerland.

Duration: 1 April 2010 – 31 March 2013.

Description: SAFROS addresses the development of technologies for patient safety in robotic surgery. We define patient safety metrics for surgical procedures and then develop methods that abide by safety requirements, formulated in terms of our metrics. We aim at demonstrating that a properly controlled robotic surgery carried out in accordance to our safety criteria can improve the level of patient safety currently achievable by traditional surgery.

The main innovative aspects of this project are:

1. Research driven by patient-safety requirements.
2. Emphasis on methodological rigor: development of a methodology founded in evidence-based medicine
3. Scope: the entire surgical workflow is considered for development and validation.

SAFROS focuses on innovative development of methods for the following
technologies:

1. Soft organ modeling and calibration, considering patient pathologies and anatomical variants.
2. Simulation planning in deformable environments.
3. Intra-operative registration and workflow monitoring.
4. Robot modeling and performance monitoring.
5. Surgeon training.
6. Operator interface with integrated stereovision and haptics.

New methods are integrated and validated on two distinct surgical robots (MIRO and RAMS), with respect to two inherently different contexts (pancreatic and vascular surgery). We quantitatively validate the adherence of our methods to the safety criteria, using surgical phantoms and animals. By comparing across robots and surgical contexts we draw conclusions about the generality of our approach.

URL: http://www.safros.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-247772)

Partners: Cardiff University, United Kingdom; Central Laboratory of Mechatronics and Instrumentation - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria; Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus, Italy; Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Zur Foerderung Der Angewandten Forschung E.V, Germany; Stuttgart Media University (Hochschule der Medien), Germany; Hewlett-Packard Italiana srl, Italy; Fundacion Instituto Gerontologico Matia – INGEMA, Spain; Profactor GMBH, Austria; Robotnik Automation SLL, Spain; University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom

Duration: 1 February 2010 – 31 January 2013.

Description: The project focuses on the development and prototyping of remotely-controlled, semi-autonomous robotic solutions in domestic environments to support elderly people. In particular, the SRS project will demonstrate an innovative, practical and efficient system called “SRS robot” for personalised home care.

Most elderly people want to live in the familiar environment of their own residence for as long as possible. However, not many can live with their adult children and therefore, at some stage, often late in life, have to live alone. Studies show that some forms of home care are usually required as they advance in years.

SRS solutions are designed to enable a robot to act as a shadow of its controller. For example, elderly parents can have a robot as a shadow of their children or carers. In this case, adult children or carers can help them remotely and physically with tasks such as getting up or going to bed, doing the laundry and setting up ICT equipment etc. as if the children or carers were resident in the house. This objective will be realised by the following SRS innovations:

1. A new intent-based remote control mechanism to enable the robots to be tele-operated over a real-world communication network robustly.
2. An adaptive autonomy mechanism to enable a highly efficient task execution for remotely controlled service robots.
3. A new robotic self-learning mechanism to enable the robots to learn from their experience.
4. A safety-oriented framework derived through extensive usability and user acceptance studies that enable service robots to be effectively deployed into home care applications.

The SRS prototypes created with EU support in the SRS project will be tested at the “S.Maria Nascente” Centre in Milano and the IZA Care Center in San Sebastián. The final solution will be further developed by industrial partners for a worldwide market with significant potential and volume.

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

Funding: European Commission ()

Partners: KUKA Roboter GMBH, Germany; Grundfos AS, Denmark; Convergent Information Technologies GmbH, Austria; Aalborg Universitet, Denmark; Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet, Germany; Deutsches Zentrum Fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany.

Duration: 1 October 2010 – 30 September 2014.

Description: TAPAS aims to pioneer the following tasks in real production environments: mobile robots with manipulation arms will make logistic tasks more flexible and more complete by not only transporting, but by also collecting the parts needed and delivering them right to the place were they are needed. Since moving parts around the shop floor does not create value by itself, TAPAS robots go even beyond: they will automate assistive tasks that naturally extend the logistic tasks, such as preparatory and post-processing work, e.g., pre-assembly or machine tending with inherent quality control. Through this additional creation of value and by a faster adaptation to changes with new levels of robustness, availability, and completeness of jobs TAPAS promises to yield an earlier return of investment.

To reach the objectives, the TAPAS consortium will iteratively test and validate the developments with two pilot installations of increasing complexity and scale. The drivers behind TAPAS are a robot manufacturer and a system integrator, providing both their production environments for intensive testing and validation, and a software technology provider. Teaming up with three excellent research partners they will develop logistic and assistive robotic solutions for transformable automation that are generally applicable and scalable.

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

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248587)

Partners: Universita di Pisa, Italy; Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany; National Technical University of Athens, Greece; Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy; Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands; Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6, France; Max Planck Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Wissenschaften, Germany; Lunds Universitet, Sweden; Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden; Arizona State University, United States of America

Duration: 1 March 2010 – 28 February 2014.

Description: The scientific goals of the project concern the reciprocal linkages between the physical hand and its high-level control functions, and the way that the embodiment enables and determines its behaviours and cognitive functions. The Hand Embodied refers to the "hand" as both a cognitive entity ­ standing for the sense of active touch ­ and as the physical embodiment of such sense, the organ, comprised of actuators and sensors that ultimately realize the link between perception and action. The study of the intrinsic relationship between the hand as a cognitive abstraction and its bodily instance will be made possible by (a) performing neuroscientific and perceptual behavioural studies with participants engaged in controlled manual activities and (b) the parallel development of a theoretical framework to lay the foundations for design and control of robotic hands and haptic interfaces.

The general idea is to study how the embodied characteristics of the human hand and its sensors, the sensorimotor transformations, and the very constraints they impose, affect and determine the learning and control strategies we use for such fundamental cognitive functions as exploring, grasping and manipulating. By learning from human data and hypotheses-driven simulations how to devise improved system architectures for the hand as a cognitive organ, the ultimate goal of the project is to design and control new and improved robot hands, haptic interfaces and hand prostheses. The project hinges on the conceptual structure and the geometry of such enabling constraints or synergies: correlations in redundant hand mobility (motor synergies), correlations in redundant cutaneous and kinaesthetic receptors readings (multi-cue integration), and overall sensorimotor system synergies. These also form the project's key ideas behind advancing the state of the art in artificial systems for robotic manipulation and haptic and neuroprosthetic interfaces.

URL: http://www.thehandembodied.eu

Funding: European Commission (FP7-ICT-248497)

Partners: Universitat Jaume I de Castellon, Spain; Universitat de Girona, Italy; Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain; Alma Mater Studiorum-Universita di Bologna, Italy; Universita degli Studi di Genova, Italy; Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal; Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom; Graal Tech, Italy

Duration: 1 January 2010 – 31 December 2013.

Description: TRIDENT proposes a new methodology for multipurpose underwater intervention tasks with diverse potential applications like underwater archaeology, oceanography and offshore industries, and goes beyond present-day methods typically based on manned and / or purpose-built systems. Trident is based on new forms of cooperation between an Autonomous Surface Craft and an Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.

Firstly, the I-AUV performs a path following survey, where it gathers optical and / or acoustic data from the seafloor, whilst the ASC provides geo-referenced navigation data and communications with the end user. The motion of the ASC will be coordinated with that of the I-AUV for precise Ultra Short Base Line positioning and reliable acoustic communications. After the survey, the I-AUV docks with the ASC and sends the data back to a ground station where a map is set up and a target object is identified by the end user. Secondly, the ASC navigates towards a waypoint near the intervention area to search for the object. When the target object has been found, the I-AUV switches to free floating navigation mode. The manipulation of the object takes place through a dextrous hand attached to a redundant robot arm and assisted with proper perception. Particular emphasis will be put on the research of the vehicle's intelligent control architecture to provide the embedded knowledge representation framework and the high level reasoning agents required to enable a high degree of autonomy and on-board decision making of the platform.

The new methodology will allow the user to specify an intervention task to be undertaken with regards to a particular target object, but after that the object is automatically recognised and manipulated by the robot in a completely autonomous way.

URL: http://www.irs.uji.es/trident