Proposal for a Preparatory Action for a FET Flagship on Robotics

The proposal successfully passed the first evaluation stage!

RoboCom++ Project

Rethinking Robotics for the Robot Companion of the future

RoboCom++ will gather the community and organise the knowledge necessary to rethink the design principles and fabrication technologies of future robots. RoboCom++ will aim at developing the cooperative robots (or Companion Robots) of the year 2030, by fostering a deeply multidisciplinary, transnational and federated effort.

RoboCom++ will pursue a radically new design paradigm, grounded in the scientific studies of intelligence in nature. Simplification mechanisms will be based on the concepts of embodied intelligence, morphological computation, simplexity, and evolutionary and developmental approaches.

RoboCom++ is coordinated by Paolo Dario (The BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa, Italy)) and involves 24 partners (13 funded from 9 Countries – 7 EU and 2 Associated; 11 in-kind from additional 8 Countries – 7 EU and 1 Associated). RoboCom++ spans a multitude of disciplines such as robotics, systems neuroscience, social neuroscience, psychology, material and energy science, computer science, human and social sciences, ethics, law, and industrial design

Three main lines of action

to pursue the ambitous objectives of RoboCom++

building the community

Building an interdisciplinary community of outstanding, highly motivated and committed experts and organisations. RoboCom++ will involve a wider community of roboticists and non-roboticists, including material scientists, mathematicians, AI experts, biologists, physicists, neuroscientists, economists, sociologists, philosophers and others

Defining Science & Technology Roadmaps

Defining the long-term S&T roadmap, competitiveness strategy, governing and financing structure, and the ethical, legal, economic and social framework of a future FET Flagship–like initiative on Robotics

Targeting Five Exploratory Pilots

Research on emerging disruptive ideas will be stimulated and carried out in the RoboCom++ Project, to the level of proof-of-concept to be applicable in the further definition of the FET-Flagship