In recent years the manufacturing sector has been one of the stable pillars of European economic growth and therefore prosperity. Photonics, as one of the advanced technologies for industry identified by the European Union, is a relevant deep technology that plays a key role in supporting and innovating the manufacturing ecosystem. On the European landscape several initiatives exist that facilitate cooperation on Photonics, ranging from the public private partnership Photonics21, to European wide clusters like EPIC association and the Digital innovation hub Photonhub Europe. However, they focus mainly on support for individual organisations and while there is also the S3 platform partnership on Photonics, there is no support available to coordinate interregional cooperation in deeptech with the focus on Photonics for manufacturing. Goal of the project is the establishment of an interregional deeptech innovation support network for manufacturing with the focus on Photonics. Output will be a joint supra-regional strategy with best-practice measures for the use of Deeptech/Photonics to support European missions and company competitiveness. This strategy will be co-developed by relevant regional stakeholders from the government body, research, industry and makers communities and include tangible steps to use the complementarities and cooperation potential of the regions to ensure cross-fertilisation.

CONCERT has a clear focus on developing robotics technologies aiming at a novel concept of configurable robot platforms, which can be explored in application domains with unstructured, variable and evolving workspace settings and tasks. It targets to make a step transition from the current general-purpose lower power collaborative robots to a new generation of collaborative platforms that can safely collaborate in tasks with demanding human-scale forces while ensuring safety on the fly, implement efficient collaboration principles and demonstrate quick adaptability to address less standardized and more unstructured environment and task settings. It proposes the development of a new paradigm of high power/strength, adaptable, collaborative robots, which leverages on modular and configurable robot hardware with adaptive physical capabilities. automatic deployment of control and online safety verification methods. Multi-modal and multi-state perception and supervision tools provides enhanced human, robot and task execution awareness enabling the implementation of adaptive shared autonomy and role allocation planning in human robot collaboration. The development of the CONCERT technologies is steered by use-case scenarios from the construction industry, a sector with significantly high socio-economic impact, offering at the same time an extremely challenging, yet highly motivating and pertinent domain for demonstrating and validating the quick deployment and interoperability features of the CONCERT configurable collaborative robotic solutions. The project technologies will be therefore validated in relevant construction task activities exhibiting high payloads and diverse workspace size and settings, thus requiring different robot arrangements to perform them. The assessment methodology considers several indicators covering the technical, functional, occupational, labor effort, and societal aspects and impacts of the CONCERT technologies.

SiToLub project aims to develop a digital tool/platform for the Safe and Sustainable by Design formulation of new lubricants. The tools developed will provide assessment of the safety (toxicity to humans, ecotoxicity to environment and workers risk) and, at the same time, sustainability guidance to design ecofluids (coolants, greases, oils) in a clear and holistic way regarding the foreseeable physico-chemical properties and tribological performance. The safety assessment will be realized by using molecular dynamic models developed by the partners. The tribological models will allow the prediction of the energy consumption during use by providing friction force values, and expected durability of the materials by using wear data about the materials in contact with different fluids. they will also provide information about tthe degradation of the fluids in use and the chemical reactions occurring. The models will be flexible enough to predict the behaviour of the materials for different working parameters applied for different applications (wind turbines, electric cars and waterborne) This ambitious and forward-thinking system will leverage on a series of tools, ranging from technical evaluation and prediction models (computational models supported by artificial intelligence), combined with established Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA) methodologies to consider the environmental, social and economic impact. The project will move in close collaboration with already funded European projects as i-Tribomat (H2020 G.A. 814494) for the creation of a OiTB for tribological materials, OntoCommons (H2020 G.A. 958371) for the standardisation of data documentation across all domains related to materials and manufacturing and IRISS (HORIZON EUROPE G.A. 101058245), the international ecosystem for accelerating the transition to Safe-and-Sustainable-by-design materials, products and processes.

Assistant for Quality Check during Construction Execution Processes for Energy-efficienT buildings Problem: What the consortium sees as a major problem today is the potential loss of benefits of energy-efficient building components because of the lack of knowledge or bad implementation during the construction processes. Solution: During the project ACCEPT will be created – An assistant for quality check during construction execution processes for energy-efficienT buildings. The assistant will run on Smart Glasses and unobtrusively guide workers during the construction on site. This provides a standardized and coordinated process for all workers, ensuring that all benefits of energy-efficient building components are maintained. From a user perspective ACCEPT is focused on the following very clear main results: 1. The Construction Operator Assistant App (CoOpApp) running on Smart Glasses, which passively collects data and actively provides guidance to the worker on site during the building process. (Pillar I: Advanced Knowledge Transfer for Energy-efficient Construction) 2. A Site Manager App (SiMaApp) running on a mobile device, which allows to remotely coordinate the working process as well as collect additional data on site by different sensors. (Pillar II: Agile Project Coordination for Bridging Heterogeneity) 3. An interactive web-based Dashboard as a monitoring and quality assurance solution. The Dashboard will use self-inspection methods to determine important characteristics such as U-Values. (Pillar III: Adaptive Quality Assurance with Self-Inspection Features) The project is fully build around achieving a maximum of impaxt: The three results will be accompanied by 7 real-world pilots grouped into 3 piloting areas within the project. Pilots are located in 4 different EU countries.