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Explainable, Safe, Contact-Aware Planning and Control for Heavy Machinery Manipulation and Navigation

Project description

Deep neural networks for automatic machine adaptation

Earth-moving, forestry and urban logistics are sectors where increased autonomy can drive economic growth and address critical challenges, such as labour shortages and environmental concerns like reducing soil damage and fuel consumption. However, machines in these sectors struggle to adapt to varying tasks and terrain. The EU-funded XSCAVE project will leverage deep neural networks to automatically learn terrain-specific excavation, forwarding and navigation strategies. It will develop fast, safe and explainable models for adaptive excavation and navigation, marking a significant advancement in autonomy for the earth-moving, forestry and logistics industries. These models will enable machines to plan and adjust their actions based on tasks and terrain conditions. The results will be demonstrated in collaboration with earth-moving, forestry and outdoor logistic vehicles companies.

Objective

Earth-Moving, Forestry, and Urban Logistics are sectors where increased autonomy can spur drastic economic growth along with addressing some core societal (e.g. address labor shortage) and environmental problems (e.g. minimize soil damage, fuel consumption). Yet there are persisting challenges related to variations of tasks/environments that are intricately linked to the terrain-machine contact encountered during navigation and manipulation. For example, an Excavator machine used in Earth-Moving needs to adapt to different types of terrain (ground) underneath (loose soil, rocks of different shapes and sizes), for scooping. Such task and environment adaptation require machines to modify their “perception-to-action” mapping based on online observations from different sensing modalities. XSCAVE will leverage the exceptional representation and approximation capabilities of deep neural networks to automatically learn the terrain/specific adaptation of excavation, forwarding, and navigation strategies from data. The overall objective of XSCAVE is (i) to develop capabilities for learning performant (high-speed), safe (stable, contact-aware), and explainable perception-to-action models for terrain adaptive excavation and navigation strategies and (ii) demonstrate step-change in autonomy for Excavation, Forwarding and Navigation tasks prevalent in Earth-Moving, Forestry and Logistics industries. To this end, XSCAVE aims to re-imagine deep-learned models as neural networks augmented with parameterized structured priors derived from physics, optimization, and classical search to bring domain knowledge into the learning pipeline. The fundamental innovations at the algorithmic level will translate to unprecedented ability for the machines to plan, control and adapt their actions depending on the task and terrain contact conditions. The end-results will be demonstrated in partnership with Novatron (earth-moving), Komatsu (forestry), and Clevon (outdoor logistic vehicles).

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HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL4-2024-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01

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Coordinator

TARTU ULIKOOL
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 107 375,00
Address
ULIKOOLI 18
51005 TARTU
Estonia

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Region
Eesti Eesti Lõuna-Eesti
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 107 375,00

Participants (10)

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