Funding programme:
IST Call 6 Technological Priority : Complex problem solving in science, engineering, business and for society Strategic Objective : 2.6.1 Advanced Robotics Evaluation Scheme : One-step Type of Project : STREP

Project description:
SUBJECT : The objective of CRAFT is to improve and enable robotic systems that colaborate with another, humans, and the environment in order to fulfill varying tasks in space and production domains. This requires dependable plugin-based robotic systems with highly dynamic self-adaption, -configuration, -healing, and -learning features. PROPOSAL OUTLINE: The objective of CRAFT is to improve and enable robotic systems that colaborate with another, humans, and the environment. In order to fulfill varying tasks in domains such as space, home, entertainment, or production we plan to develop dependable and self-managing robotic systems that are able to configure themself as required by a specific task. In a space scenario with high restrictions on carrying weigth, robotic components should be as flexible as possible and composable to many other large robotic systems. In the production scenario a worker should be actively supported at the workplace, which requires intelligent, flexible, modular, safe, dependable, robust and user-driven robot systems. Therefore CRAFT is targeted to support the development of dependable plugin-based robotic systems with highly dynamic self-adaption, -configuration, -healing, and -learning features. The underlying modular design and architecture of the software and robotic system will be based on component- and plugin-based principles in order to guarantee a certain level of safety, robustness, and dependability of these systems. We foresee to use ontologies describing the tasks at hand and the robotic component characteristics including their appropriateness for a specific task. Self-describing robotic components should be able to communicate their characteristics either to a central computing device or other conected components. * Keywords : components, plugins, ontologies, robotics, self-adaptive, plug-and-play

Description of work:
Fraunhofer IESE will provide the plug-and-play component-based development methodology as well as the ontology development. Further work to be done is: Research Partner: * Agent Research (Research on self-coordinating agents, swarm intelligence) * Robotic Systems (Research on hardware and protocol issues for CRAFT) Development Partner: * Software Development Partner (Development of robotic software systems and building blocks) * Developer of robotic systems (Development of modular robotic systems based on the developed technology with a focus on one domain) Required expertise : Research Partner: Research organizations with outstanding reputation in robotic systems engineering research Development Partner: Companies with an extensive record of expertise in systematic software engineering for robotic systems or robot developement and engineering Application Partner: Companies that are using robotic systems in the production (e.g., Automotive), entertainment (e.g., game robots), or Space (e.g., space robots) sectors. Application Partner: * Production (e.g., Automotive) * Entertainment (e.g., game robots) * Space (e.g., Astronaut's supportive robots)