Smart autos need to process and react to different types of stimuli from the surrounding environment. This data sensing and processing is performed with the support of different sensors, gathered data and the proper hardware platform to process the received data and react properly to the simuli whenever required. This project targets audio stimuli and considers two important challenges: Processing and localisation of the Audio signal based on the classic as well as deep learning methods

Micro-ROS will be a Robotic framework targeting embedded and deep embedded robot components with extremely constrained computational resources. These devices have special characteristics: minimum real time operating system or no operating system, battery powered, wireless low bandwidth connections, and intermittent operation with sleep periods. Micro-ROS will be compatible with the Robot Operating System (ROS 2.0), the de facto standard for robot application development. Micro-ROS will enable the interoperability of traditional robots with IoT sensors and devices, creating truly distributed robotic systems using a common framework. Micro-ROS empowers these computational devices with constrained resources to become first class participants of the ROS ecosystem allowing to create smaller robots using the same tools as well as taking advantage of the increasing overlapping between robotics, smart embedded devices and IoT.

The worldwide economic downturn forces the Western companies to cut costs and enhances the performances of their processes in order to maintain the European leadership and excellence in manufacturing. Effectively, European businesses cannot compete anymore on workforce costs with Eastern countries: as a result the manufacturers have to leverage on more sustainable and efficient production systems. In this scenario ICT has represented, throughout the years, the crucial enabler for preserving competitiveness and fostering industry innovation. In particular, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a breakthrough research area for ICT in manufacturing and represents also the new innovation frontier for accomplishing the EU2020 “smart everywhere” vision. Thus, an important factor for a successful innovation strategy is a more aware and widespread use of the CPS engineering in the manufacturing environment to ensure a competitive advantage for business success and jobs creation. sCorPiuS investigates, in particular, the role of CPS as a lever to empower manufacturing performance and proposes the creation of a roadmap capable to preempting the most important technological trends. Therefore, the project purpose is to support the planning of the Research and Innovation activities with the involvement of the most important European stakeholders. In addition, the dissemination of the project activities is crucial for the success of the project and for the sustainability of its outputs in the long term, the principle behind is that collaboration is the enabler of innovation. For these reasons, one of the main objectives of sCorPiuS is to perform activities for creating consensus, community building and awareness within the targeted communities of the European Union.

Imagine a scenario where multiple robots have been deployed to provide services such as object handling/transportation, or pickup and delivery operations. In such a context, different robots with varying capabilities must be coordinated in order to achieve various multi-tasking procedures. Thus, the effective supervision and coordination of the overall heterogeneous system mandates a decentralized framework that integrates high-level task-planning, low-level motion control and robust, real-time sensing of the robots’ dynamic environment. Current practice is at a great deal based on offline, centralized planning and related tasks are usually fulfilled in a predefined manner: this does not utilize the capabilities of the system to operate efficiently in a dynamic environment. In most cases, sudden changes in the environment, the type of tasks, and the need for coordination, would cause the system to halt, ask for human intervention and restart. Despite the fact that public facilities are in some degree prestructured, the need for a framework for decentralized, real-time, automated task (re)-planning is evident in a twofold manner: (i) it will pave the way to an improved use of resources and a faster accomplishment of tasks inside public facilities and workspaces with high social activity; (ii) it will make an important contribution towards the vision of more flexible multirobot applications in both professional or domestic environments, also in view of the “Industry 4.0” vision and the general need to deploy such systems in everyday life scenarios. Within Co4Robots our goal is to build a systematic methodology to accomplish complex specifications given to a team of potentially heterogeneous robots; control schemes appropriate for the mobility and manipulation capabilities of the considered robots; perceptual capabilities that enable robots to localize themselves and estimate the state of the dynamic environment; and their systematic integration approach.