Soft Robotics for Advanced physical capabilities (IA) (AI/Data/Robotics Partnership)

Expected Outcome:

Increased exploitation of novel materials, design methods, and control techniques for soft robotics, enabling the creation of inherently safe and versatile robotic systems with applications in various industries, including healthcare, maintenance, manufacturing, and transportation.

Scope:

Soft robotics^[1] represents an important avenue to advance robotics, particularly for enhancing safety and physical interaction. Its potential lies in creating systems with intrinsic and functional safety, capable of securely interacting with humans across various scenarios. By using compliant designs, these systems overcome the limitations of rigid robotic systems, such as limited adaptability and reduced safety around humans. Novel design methods, the use of smart materials, deformable physical architectures, and bioinspired approaches are key to improving robotic performance. However, significant challenges remain in learning, modelling, simulation, control, actuation, sensing, and the integration of soft electronics.

To address this, proposals should focus on exploiting novel materials and design methods for non-rigid structures, along with advanced control techniques for soft robotic systems.

Proposals should cover one or more of the following areas:

• Exploitation of novel materials suited to developing robotic systems, both as the main structure and of manipulators and end effectors. These may encompass passive and active materials, and combination materials with specific properties.
• Design methods for non-rigid structures and the means to accurate and sense position where this may no longer involve fixed rotational or linear links
• Control methods for structures built from novel and soft materials or for structures that emulate rigid structures using soft materials.

The proposals should include at least three different demonstrators from different sectors that clearly show the advantage of soft robotics in the context of some chosen application scenarios. The objective is to develop and disseminate general purpose tools and systems, therefore the results should not be limited to the demonstration scenarios selected in the proposals to demonstrate the technological progress.

All proposals are expected to incorporate mechanisms for assessing and demonstrating progress, including qualitative and quantitative KPIs, benchmarking, and progress monitoring. When possible, proposals should build on and reuse public results from relevant previous funded actions. Communicable results should be shared with the European R&D community through the AI-on-demand platform, and if necessary, other relevant digital resource platforms to bolster the European AI, Data, and Robotics ecosystem by disseminating results and best practices.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on AI, data and robotics (ADRA), and all proposals are expected to allocate tasks for cohesion activities with ADRA.

Proposals should also build on or seek collaboration with existing projects and develop synergies with other relevant International, European, national or regional initiatives.

[1] soft robotics concerns the design, control, and fabrication of robots composed of compliant materials, instead of rigid links. Hence such robots can be composed of rigid parts linked by compliant links