Socially-Acceptable and Trustworthy Human-Robot Teaming for Agile Industries
The SOPRANO project focuses on innovation in human-robot collaboration and intelligent multi-agent systems to enable the design of next generation manufacturing floors, automated construction sites, and smart agri-food production where humans and intelligent machines seamlessly work together.
Challenges in Developing Trustworthy Multi-Human Multi-Robot Systems
1. Flexibility in Production Processes
2. Dynamic Optimization of Resources
3. Collaborative Task Development
4. Acceptance, Trust, and Safety of Workers
SOPRANO addresses both the synergistic task execution by humans and robots as part of the collaborative robot paradigm, and the strategic role of intelligent multi-robot systems where distributed and interconnected robots, with different characteristics and functions, are intelligently orchestrated to perform tasks whose complexity and cost are too demanding for a single robot to accomplish on its own.
The project aspires to scale robotics collaboration from the single human-robot dyad to a peer-based synergy between heterogeneous robots featuring different physical and cognitive properties, supporting various tasks in collaboration with humans or other robotic agents.
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SOPRANO aims to design the next generation of multi-human multi-robot systems to support more flexible, resilient and reconfigurable agile processes.
SOPRANO Project Approach
Advanced collaborative human-centric robotic capabilities
Trustworthy and dependable AI-based multi-human multi-robot teaming
Modular, reconfigurable and flexible engineering tools and techniques to support adaptability and ease of use
Verification and validation of the methods and tools by Industry
SOPRANO will deliver advanced collaborative human-centric robotic capabilities by improving context awareness in highly uncertain indoor and outdoor environments, via ubiquitous, visual and non-visual sensing, and exploiting the notion of time and models from industrial and cognitive psychology for: i) autonomous navigation, ii) detection of objects with challenging properties, iii) grasping and manipulation, iv) perception of human actions, and v) effective human-robot collaborations and synchronization.
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Project technologies will enable the development of trustworthy and dependable AI-based multi-human multi-robot teaming that ensures safe and robust operation in industrial environments. These advancements will encompass: i) techniques for safety monitoring, diagnosis, AI planning and reasoning, ii) model-driven simulation-based approaches to assess quality aspects and iii) a human-digital twin integrating the human resource in the system design and operation for dynamic and accurate multi-human multi-robot monitoring.
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The project will extend modular, reconfigurable and flexible engineering tools and techniques to support adaptability and ease of use in various operating environments through the exploitation of: i) robot programming, ii) easy configuration of AI-supported tools in ML Operations via high-level abstractions to dynamically adapt to product changes, iii) model-based development of reconfigurable control architectures supporting modification of control policies at run time, and iv) open standards-based cloud platforms and federated cloud-edge service orchestration for Industrial IoT ecosystems with auto-organisation of tasks and resources.
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SOPRANO will validate the innovative technological solutions in three novel use cases addressing both large-scale industries and small to medium size companies and adding value to EU industries and instrumenting community building in the EU industrial ecosystem. Further support is foreseen to external technology providers, such as SMEs and start-ups, via an Open Call aiming to enhance the project demonstrators by integrating external technologies but also provide added value to external industrial partners' own applications via the exploitation of SOPRANO technologies.
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