Maintaining Europe’s competitiveness demands highly efficient and flexible industrial processes. Novel intelligent robotic capabilities deployed side-by-side with humans and able to adapt to dynamic situations can address these demands. However, existing robotic systems cannot fit well into such settings as they are not versatile and flexible enough to automate certain tasks, cannot collaborate safely with humans in open and dynamic environments, and are not easily and economically adaptable to process changes.
SOPRANO aims to enable a next generation of multi-human multi-robot (MH-MR) systems to support more flexible, resilient and reconfigurable agile processes built on the following innovative technology pillars:
• Advanced collaborative human-centric robotic capabilities by improving context awareness in highly uncertain indoor and outdoor environments, via ubiquitous, visual and non-visual sensing, exploiting the notion of time and models from industrial and cognitive psychology.
• Trustworthy and Dependable AI-based MH-MR teaming that ensures safe and robust operation in industrial environments encompassing safety monitoring, diagnostics, AI planning and reasoning, model-driven simulation-based approaches to assess quality aspects, human-digital twin integrating the human resource in the system design, and dynamic operation monitoring.
• Modular, reconfigurable and flexible engineering tools to support adaptability and ease of use in various operating environments through the exploitation of robot programming, easy configuration of AI-supported tools to dynamically adapt to product changes, model-based development of reconfigurable control systems supporting adaptive control policies at run time, and open standards-based cloud and federated cloud-edge service orchestration with automatic organisation of tasks and resources.
The SOPRANO technology pillars will enable truly agile production processes across multiple European industries able to autonomously adapt to changes in product requirements and components, human collaborative tasks and real-time changes in resources and supplies.
