Hub Digital Infrastructure

The European Union (EU) has experienced a decline in employment rates in various sectors such as industry, construction, and healthcare, with an aging workforce exacerbating the issue. To improve overall life standards and welfare, the EU’s Horizon Europe programme is investing in emerging technology such as robotics and AI.
FORTIS specifically focuses on providing a complete Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) solution that includes multi-modal communication and multi-aspect interaction. The goal is to develop a human-centric solution that addresses the needs of both the human workforce and the robots, allowing them to work together efficiently and safely. With cutting-edge research and advanced technology, this solution can help to mitigate the negative effects of an aging workforce on employment, working conditions, and welfare in the EU.
The project will conduct three main pilots in the sectors of construction, infrastructure services, and manufacturing. These pilots will provide a total of 5 use cases to demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of the Human-Robot Interaction.
Moreover, FORTIS will allocate a portion of the budget to finance pilots that allow civilians to interact with the robots in different settings, such as healthcare, public events, shopping centres, and grocery stores. This will provide an opportunity to evaluate the performance of the HRI solution in various real-world scenarios.

DEADLINE : 4 juin 2025

HUB : Data Science & AI

Manufacturing, construction, and agriculture are major driving forces for the European economy and prosperity. Maintaining its competitiveness in these sectors demands highly efficient and flexible processes, and this can be achieved through digitization. Novel intelligent robotic capabilities that can be deployed side-by-side with humans and can operate and adapt to dynamic environments can accelerate this process. 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, nor are they easily and economically adaptable to process changes.

The SOPRANO project coalesces multidisciplinary research and innovation in human-robot collaboration and intelligent multi-agent systems, aspiring to design the next generation of manufacturing floors, construction sites, and agri-food production, where humans and intelligent machines will seamlessly work together. It proposes to scale collaboration from the single human-agent dyad to a peer-based synergy between multiple interconnected robotic systems featuring different physical and cognitive properties, supporting various tasks in collaboration with human workers, robotics and other agents.

SOPRANO will validate the technological offering in three novel and open-access use cases addressing both large-scale industries and small to medium enterprises, adding value to EU key sectors and instrumenting community building surrounding the open-source technologies in the EU industrial ecosystem. During the project, we will also enable external SMEs and start-ups to benefit from the project technologies via an open call, which will enable the building of demonstrators using SOPRANO technologies that will open new market opportunities for their products and services.

DEADLINE : 14 mai 2025

HUB : Advanced Engineering & Computing

To strengthen the competitiveness of the EU industry, there is an increasing need for flexible production, exploiting the capabilities of both the machinery and human workforce. The growing market of robots has reacted, adapting to the changing situation by providing collaborative robotic solutions with a variety of characteristics in terms of payload, type and mobility. A number of technological solutions for perception and safety allow their coexistence with humans. While several research activities have been conducted over the past 5 years on this topic, wider industrial adoption is lagging due to the following restrictions:
• Limited cognition and intelligence
• Low performance of collaborative operations
• Collaboration fluidity is rather low as the operators have to adapt to the particularities of the robots.
• Complexity in robot programming which requires the involvement of skilled engineers, does not provide flexibility in the execution phase, and does not benefit from the tacit knowledge of experienced operators.

Thus, despite the fact the mechatronics are quite advanced, a perfect matching of mechanics and control is required to create robots that advance from repetitive and precision-oriented tasks to becoming intelligent and helpful co-workers. Proper human robot interaction is the most important ground to be covered.

Thus, JARVIS aims to develop a reusable set of tools that enable AI driven multimodal means of interaction: a) involving interfaces for physical and remote information exchange, robot control and programming, b) providing social skills to a variety of robots to achieve seamless user-centric interaction that extends human ability for complex tasks and c) demonstrating scalability of application and ability to achieve economies at scale.

DEADLINE : 5 mai 2025

HUB : Cyber & Security