Projects
The "Embodied Intelligence" initiative launched by FET Proactive consists of six projects: one IP (OCTOPUS IP) and five STREP, all started in February 2009.
OCTOPUS (IP) aims at investigating and understanding the principles that give rise to the octopus sensory-motor capabilities and at incorporating them in new design approaches and technologies for building physically embodied, soft -bodied, hyper-redundant, dextrous artefacts. To this purpose, a robotic artefact will be built in OCTOPUS that can locomote in water over a variety of terrains, explore narrow spaces, grasp objects and manipulate them eff ectively. The grand challenge that this IP will pursue is the design and development of the ICT and robotics technologies allowing the building of an embodied artefact, based broadly on the anatomy of an octopus, and with similar performance in water, in terms of dexterity, speed, control, fl exibility, and applicability.
LOCOMORPH (STREP) will push beyond the state of the art in robotic locomotion and movements, by increasing efficiency, robustness, and thus usability in unknown environments. As robotic research and industry are competing to increase robots’ usability towards the highly-indemand service robotics, advancements in robotic locomotion today would give Europe a significant competitive advantage. Locomorph combines multidisciplinary approaches from biology, biomechanics, neuroscience, robotics, and embodied intelligence to investigate locomotion and movements in animals and robots, focusing on two concepts: morphology and morphosis. Through an exploration of morphology and morphosis, the consortium will develop robots with increased manoeuvrability, self-stabilization, energy efficiency, and adaptation to unknown environments.These advances will bring us closer to service robotics, as a large part of these robots must be able to locomote safely, regardless of surfaces, layouts, or terrains.
VIACTORS (STREP) addresses the development and use of safe, energy-efficient and highly dynamic variable impedance actuation systems, which will permit the embodiment of natural characteristics found in biological systems, into the structures of a new generation of mechatronic systems. Th is advance in technology will pave the way towards new application fields, such as industrial co-workers, household robots, advanced prostheses and rehabilitation devices, and autonomous robots for exploration of remote planets. Therefore, this project will deeply impact applications where successful task completion requires people and robots to collaborate directly in a shared workspace or robots to move autonomously and safely.
EMORPH (STREP) proposes to overcome the limitations of ICT, which despite its dramatic progress has not yet been able to design and build artifi cial systems that can compete with biological ones, on many aspects. Th ere are limitations both at the technological level, and at the theoretical/computational level. EMORPH proposes to explore the concepts of embodied intelligence, by combining the design of novel data-driven biologically inspired sensory devices with the development of new asynchronous event-driven computational paradigms, with structure and morphology that are matched to the requirements of the robot’s body and its application domain. The project will design asynchronous vision sensors with non-uniform morphology, using analogue VLSI neuromorphic circuits, develop supporting data-driven asynchronous computational paradigms for machine-vision methodologies that are radically different from conventional ones, and test embodied intelligence on advanced humanoid robotic platforms.
EVRYON (STREP) will develop a novel design approach for the development of wearable robots, such as active orthoses, prostheses and exoskeletons for functional restoration, functional substitution, rehabilitation and human augmentation. Th e proposed approach is based on the coevolution of morphology and control, where the design of the artifi cial system takes into account the dynamics of the biological counterpart so that the human body and the robot symbiotically benefit from each other, exhibiting emergent dynamic behaviours. Th e selected robot is an actuated bilateral orthosis for the lower limbs destined to restore proper walking capabilities in chronic impaired subjects. Experiments will be performed on volunteer elderly subjects. The approach and methodology to be developed within the project will have a deep potential impact in the field of wearable robotics, biorobotics, rehabilitation and functional restoring.
ANGELS (STREP) will design and build a prototype of a reconfigurable Anguilliform swimming robot able to split into smaller agents (and vice-versa), each equipped with a bio-inspired “electric sense” used both for recognition of objects and communication between agents. Th e robot will exploit both “mechanical re-confi gurability”, by changing body form or splitting into component agents, and a new concept of “electric re-confi gurability” that will allow the robots to self-adapt their perception to their environment by changing the location of emitters and receptors on the robot boundaries. Th e electric fi eld generated around the robots can be considered as a prolongation of their material body in the surrounding water. This prolongation, that is named “electric-body”, can then be shaped through electric reconfigurations. ANGELS will explore the range of abilities conferred by diff erent mechanical and electric morphologies, from the shaping of the common electric body shared by the agents navigating in formation, to design of behavioural cooperative rules inspired by fi sh for improving multiagent perception through emergent collective behaviours.