Artificial intelligence nowadays enables the translation of isolated local awareness states from biological to artificial agents using information about the environment which can be collected from mechanical (contact, vibration, collision, etc), and electromagnetic (radio, infrared, visible light, etc) stimuli. However, the cooperation among those units is often dependent on some kind of central processing unit which collects that information and establishes a centralised awareness which distributes commands to each unit. Although useful, this process allows for very specific and previously programmed situations to be navigated and problems to be solved. For artificial agents to be able to act in the unstructured conditions that the real-world demands, a new concept of collaborative awareness is needed. EMERGE’s goal is to establish, analyse, implement and test a new artificial intelligence framework that allows this collaborative awareness to emerge from the interplay of multiple individual units of local awareness. This collaborative awareness becomes an emergent process supporting complex, distributed, and loosely coupled systems capable of high degrees of collaboration, self-regulation, and interoperability without predefined protocols.
In terms of innovation impact, EMERGE aims to surpass limitations and barriers of the current state-of-the-art multi-agent collaborative systems, with potential to produce breakthroughs and open new markets in the next generation of robotic systems. For that, the project focuses on three use cases. The first use case is modular soft robots – self‐assembling, repairing or replicating robots made from soft materials which offer high freedom of movement, even in confined spaces, and better manipulation of delicate objects. In these robots, the body formed by a physically distributed collective needs to self-organise to account for the dynamic addition of components. The second use-case are robotic swarms – groups with a large number of robots whose behaviour arises from the interactions between themselves and with their environment. This is an example of a large-scale minimal collective where agents need coordination to achieve a collaborative goal. Finally, the third use case are collaborative robots, or cobots – robots interacting in direct contact with, or in close proximity to, humans. These represent a closer-to-market use case where interoperability is currently a significant barrier. While robotics provides the perfect testing ground for this new framework, EMERGE also envisions impact in areas such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart cities and transportation, microservice-based information and communications technology (ICT) systems, and biomedical nanodevices, among others.
