The work has been carried out along the two main and equally important pillars of the projects, namely
1 - Scientific and Technological Excellence
The methodical aspects which were researched were all related to the question of advancing transferability and reusability of methods and data in the specific field. As it turned out, the understanding of what transferability is and how it can be achieved, is very different among the research areas and even within different research groups within an area. The activities included therefore joint workshops, tutorials and summer schools, defining and addressing the transferability question within each field and detailing the research agenda for the next years. These activities are currently been summarized in impactful joint publications.
Following benchmark scenarios were defined for the three application fields:
Robotic manufacturing: we focused in developing the first Internet-connected Task Board and Trial protocol. A task board Is a physical tool for benchmarking manipulation performances in both humans and robots. They provide a platform to distribute relevant and interesting tasks requiring special skills and training. The task board has been distributed to euROBIN partners for first implementations and evaluation.
Personal robots: The first hackathon scenario was to take over a parcel containing rigid, known objects at the entry door, open it, grasp the objects and stow them in a kitchen.
Outdoor robots: explore the application of robots in urban environments to serve the people promoting sustainable communities. The representative use case is a parcel delivery to a human users using aerial, wheeled-legged, and mobile manipulation robots.
Besides the scientific activities mentioned above, for implementing cognition-enabled robotics solutions for transferability and reusability, a core element is EuroCore (European Robotics Collaborative Repository). The previous work of the project AI4Europe is taken as a basis, along with infrastructure developed by partners in other European projects (SAPHARI, ROBOHOW, etc.) as well as in national projects (EASE). Partners contribute in-kind these components, with the aim of making them a standard first in the consortium and the hopefully beyond it, Europe-wide. The used knowledge base is e.g. Open EASE, while the ROS supports with the control and implementation. One major step was the collection of knowledge bases. Within the first euROBIN hackathon week in May 2023 in Seville the needs of the teams have been surveilled in order to adjust the repository as well as possible to the community needs. The work for EuroCore goes on continuously. Its advancement is crucial to this project.
2 - Establishing and Running a Robotics Network of Excellence Labs
As a networking initiative, euROBIN initiated a stage for cooperation and exchange of scientific knowledge and talents between outstanding robotics labs in Europe. It started generating a nucleus to which the community at large can adhere.
The first year was mainly dedicated to establishing the specific working goals, structures, and interaction procedures among the partners of the consortium. Therefore, the hackathon was open in the first year only to partners of the consortium. EuroCore features, to the extent they are already available, are at this stage also only accessible to consortium partners.
However, all our other networking activities and instruments are open to the entire robotics community, namely:
● Scientific workshops, tutorials, summer schools
● PhD and Fellow program
● Science-Industry dialog
● Dissemination, Exploration and Communication Activities
● Cascade Funding
All these instruments were established and made operative in parallel, showing first tangible results. For example, a first group of eight new groups were selected for cascade funding, the calls for PhD and Fellow programs were issued and several international workshops and tutorials organized.
euROBIN presented its networking instruments and offers and reached out to the entire robotics community at the euRobotics Forum in Odense through a very successful event together with the EC, the AI on Demand platform and adra-e.
