22 November 2023
The EMERGE consortium got together this week at Delft University of Technology and RoboHouse in the Netherlands to celebrate the project’s first year!
The team discussed their accomplishments in each area and their plans for the future. Specials thanks to TUDelft and team for organizing this great meeting!
EMERGE will deliver a new artificial intelligence framework to demonstrate how a collaborative awareness – a representation of shared existence, environment and goals – can arise from the interactions of robots, devices, and other artificial entities.
27 September 2023
The EMERGE consortium invites you to the first open meeting of the portfolio of projects funded by the EIC Pathfinder Challenge “Awareness Inside“.
Awareness and consciousness have been high on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) research agenda for decades. Progress has been difficult because it has been hard to agree on exactly what it means to be aware. Most researches would agree though that we do not have any truly aware artificial system yet, that awareness is much more than a sensorial sophistication and that it is much more than any Artificial Intelligence as we know it. But, what is it then that a user would expect from a service or device that has ‘awareness inside’?
In this workshop we will present all eight “Awareness Inside” projects funded to explore this question. Join our meeting to see preliminary results, and debate the meaning of awareness.
The meeting is taking place Oct. 1st, 2023, in Kraków, Poland, during the 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2023).
Learn more in the link below.
More Information12 September 2023
The EMERGE consortium invites you to the workshop “Inside the Ethics of AI Awareness”, on September 20th, 2023, in Brussels, Belgium.
The workshop will gather representatives of various EIC-funded projects and presents an opportunity for philosophers, computer scientists, roboticists and other experts to contribute to a nuanced understanding of ethical concerns surrounding artificial systems.
The workshop will feature two talks by Alan Winfield (University of Bristol) and Katleen Gabriels (Maastricht University), and offer opportunities for discussions and networking.
>> Registration: Attendance is free but registration is required. Please register at: https://forms.gle/kZ6y5psRaRFB6hrS6
>> Venue: Hotel Thon, Rue de la Loi 75, 1040 Brussels.
>> Program:
15:30 - 16:00 | Welcome Coffee
16:00 - 17:00 | Keynote: Alan Winfield (University of Bristol)
“Towards an Ethical Governance Framework for (self) aware systems.”
AI systems or intelligent robots that we might suspect have some degree of (self) awareness will need careful ethical governance. This is not only because of the possible impact of awareness on interactions with human users but the need for monitoring the operation of the systems themselves, especially if they exhibit signs of self-awareness. In previous work we suggested an ethical governance approach for explicitly ethical machines*. This paper will propose a framework, based on that approach, for the strong ethical governance of (self) aware systems. *AF Winfield, K Michael, J Pitt and V Evers (2019) Machine Ethics: The Design and Governance of Ethical AI and Autonomous Systems, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2019.2900622.
17:00 - 18:00 | Keynote: Katleen Gabriels (Maastricht University)
“AI Enhancement: Can human intelligence be cognitively and morally enhanced by artificial intelligence?”
The advantages artificial intelligence (AI) has over humans are, among other things, efficiency, speed, and consistency. Today, machines perform many sophisticated analyses as well or even better than humans, for instance in the context of medical decision-making, and sometimes even in ways humans would not themselves anticipate. AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sedol in 2016 in the Chinese board game Go. By playing millions of matches, AlphaGo discovered strategies. During the game with Sedol, AlphaGo made a brilliant move showing great insight. AlphaGo surprised human observers and eventually made people play Go differently by trying out the new moves. As AI is humanmade, it is fair to say that it has learned from us, from our human intelligence. Yet, the example of AlphaGo seems to suggest that human intelligence can also learn from artificial intelligence. The guiding question of this presentation is: to what extent can AI enhance us cognitively (see e.g., Nyholm, 2023) and morally (based on Volkman & Gabriels, 2023)? I will argue, among other things, that a modular system of multiple AI interlocutors could play a valuable role to enhance human moral awareness.
18:00 - 19:30 | Reception
10 July 2023
EMERGE partners from UNIPI are organizing the 4th Italian Workshop on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI.it 2023) during the 22nd International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA 2023), to be held in Rome, Italy, on November 6th - 9th, 2023.
Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly playing an increasingly important role in our daily lives. As their importance in our everyday lives grows, it is fundamental that the internal mechanisms that guide these #algorithms are as clear as possible. It is not by chance that the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) emphasized the users' right to explanation when people face artificial intelligence-based technologies.
Unfortunately, the current research tends to go in the opposite direction, since most of the approaches try to maximise the effectiveness of the models (e.g., recommendation accuracy) at the expense of the explainability and the transparency.
The main research questions which arise from this scenario are straightforward: how can we deal with such a dichotomy between the need for effective adaptive systems and the right to transparency and interpretability?
Several research lines are triggered by this question: building transparent intelligent systems, analysing the impact of opaque algorithms on final users, studying the role of explanation strategies, investigating how to provide users with more control in the behaviour of intelligent systems. The workshop tries to address these research lines and aims to provide a forum for the Italian community to discuss problems, challenges and innovative approaches in the various subfields of AI.
The deadline for paper submission is September 8th, 2023, at the link below.
About AIxIA 2023
The 22nd International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA 2023) is organized by AIxIA (Associazione Italiana per l’Intelligenza Artificiale) , which is a non-profit scientific society founded in 1988 and devoted to the promotion of Artificial Intelligence. The society aims to increase the public awareness of AI, encourage the teaching of it and promote research in the field.
20 June 2023
The EMERGE Project will deliver a new artificial intelligence framework to demonstrate how a collaborative awareness – a representation of shared existence, environment and goals – can arise from the interactions of robots, devices, and other artificial entities.
How do robots in a collective know what the group as a whole is doing? How can connected devices make sense of the world around them with so many interconnections? How can a robotic arm composed of many independent parts understand how its body is behaving as it reaches for an object? When intelligence is distributed across many parts, it can be tricky for the bigger picture to emerge. Yet answering these questions is key to making collective systems that are easy to design, monitor and control.
Learn more about EMERGE in our first project video below!
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08 June 2023
Despite facing significant criticism for assigning human-like characteristics to artificial intelligence, phrases like “trustworthy AI” are still commonly used in official documents and ethical guidelines. It is essential to consider why institutions continue to use these phrases, even though they are controversial.
In her article published in the journal Topoi, EMERGE partner Ophelia Deroy, from Ludwig Maximilian University (DE), critically evaluates various reasons for using these terms, including ontological, legal, communicative, and psychological arguments. All these justifications share the common feature of trying to justify the official use of terms like “trustworthy AI” by appealing to the need to reflect pre-existing facts, be it the ontological status, ways of representing AI or legal categories.
The article challenges the justifications for these linguistic practices observed in the field of AI ethics and AI science communication. In particular, it takes aim at two main arguments. The first is the notion that ethical discourse can move forward without the need for philosophical clarification, bypassing existing debates. The second justification argues that it’s acceptable to use anthropomorphic terms because they are consistent with the common concepts of AI held by non-experts—exaggerating this time the existing evidence and ignoring the possibility that folk beliefs about AI are not consistent and come closer to semi-propositional beliefs.
The article sounds a strong warning against the use of human-centric language when discussing AI, both in terms of principle and the potential consequences. It argues that the use of such terminology risks shaping public opinion in ways that could have negative outcomes.
Source: O. Deroy, "The Ethics of Terminology: Can We Use Human Terms to Describe AI?", Topoi, 2023. DOI: 10.1007/s11245-023-09934-1.
Access EMERGE publications in the link below.
05 June 2023
As part of the 2023 course program of the European Embedded Control Institute (EECI), the International Graduate School on Control of Soft and Articulated Elastic Robots took place in May 22nd - 26th, 2023.
About 40 registered PhD students and Post-docs from different European countries participated in the course taught by EMERGE partner Cosimo Della Santina (Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands) and Alessandro De Luca (DIAG, Sapienza University of Rome).
Abstract:
Humans and other animals still substantially outperform classic robots in performance, reliability, and efficiency. Interestingly, their physical characteristics differ substantially from those of robots. Elastic tendons, ligaments, and muscles enable animals to interact robustly with the external world and perform dynamic tasks. On the contrary, traditional robots have generally been very stiff and heavyweight. Therefore, robotics researchers have departed from the as-stiff-as-possible principle in favor of lightweight and compliant structures. Taking inspiration from the natural example, elastic and soft components are included in the robot design, yielding flexible joint or flexible link robots and, more recently, articulated and continuum soft robots. The latter are entirely made of continuously deformable elements, bringing them close to invertebrate animals. This recent explosion of new robotic concepts opened up the avenue of developing effective control strategies to manage the soft body, a nonlinear mechanical system with a large – possibly infinite – number of DOFs and, as a result, also a large degree of underactuation from the control point of view. This course aims at introducing such control challenge. We will review established results in the field, introduce the most recent advances, and discuss interesting open issues.
Topics:
- Introduction to robotics beyond rigid robots
- Flexible joint and articulated soft robots: dynamic model, structural properties, control
- Flexible link robots: dynamic model, structural properties, control
- Modelling soft robots: Constant curvature, strain discretization, general form of equations
- Controlling soft robots: shape regulation (general case and subclasses), shape tracking, and task-space control
04 June 2023
![[In the Media] Avvenire: Ideas. Every intelligence (artificial and otherwise) requires ethics](https://eic-emerge.eu/uploads/EMERGE_website_thumb1.jpg)
The EMERGE Project and the theme of artificial agents awareness is analysed and debated by Vincenzo Ambriola in a recent opinion article in the Italian newspaper Avvenire.
"In 2021, in the context of the Horizon Europe programme, the European Innovation Council opened a call called 'Pathfinder challenge' structured in five challenges, ensuring support for the exploration of strong ideas for radically innovative technologies. The topic of the consciousness of artificial entities and their interaction with humans was the focus of one of these challenges, 'Awareness inside'. In particular, research proposals were called for that could define new concepts of awareness applicable to non-human systems, including technological ones, with implications on how awareness could be recognised or measured. In addition to this, it was requested to demonstrate and validate the role and added value of a broad class of awareness products and services for which awareness characteristics may exhibit substantially different quality characteristics in terms of, for example, performance, flexibility, reliability or user experience. Of all the proposals submitted in response to the call, 39 were selected and funded, of which eight related to the artificial consciousness challenge. One of these relates to the Emerge project, led by Davide Bacciu of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, which aims to study how consciousness emerges spontaneously in a group of artificial entities working together to achieve certain goals."
Read more below (in Italian).
30 May 2023
EMERGE partners from UNIPI are organizing the “5th International Workshop on eXplainable Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining (XKDD 2023)” during the next European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD 2023), to be held in Turin, Italy, on September 18th, 2023.
In the past decade, machine learning based decision systems have been widely used in a wide range of application domains, like credit score, insurance risk, and health monitoring. Although they have an immense potential to improve the decision in different fields, their use may present ethical and legal risks, such as codifying biases, jeopardizing transparency and privacy, and reducing accountability. The purpose of this workshop is to encourage principled research that will lead to the advancement of explainable, transparent, ethical and fair #datamining and #machinelearning.
The deadline for paper submission is June 20th, 2023.
More information at the link below.
About ECML-PKDD 2023
ECML PKDD is the flagship European machine learning and data mining conference, attracting a worldwide audience. The conference program includes presentations of peer-reviewed novel research, invited talks by leaders in the field, a wide program of workshops and tutorials, poster sessions, a discovery challenge, a demo track and an Applied Data Science track.
ECML PKDD 2023 builds on over 20 years of successful events and conferences hosted around Europe. The conference will attract an audience of over 1000 attendees and will be a unique opportunity for companies to develop connections in both machine learning and data mining communities, acquire new talents, contribute to innovation and market their brands.
ECML PKDD 2023 will be held in Turin, Italy, from September 18 to September 22, 2023. It is organized by Centai (Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Politecnico di Torino.
26 May 2023
EMERGE partners from UNIPI are organizing the “2nd International Workshop on Pervasive Artificial Intelligence” during the next European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD 2023), to be held in Turin, Italy, on September 18th, 2023.
The workshop provides a forum devoted to scientific discussion and dissemination for a community and works bringing together the two aspects of Pervasive Artificial Intelligence. It targets contributions related to both novel AI methodologies, models and applications in #pervasive scenarios, as well as computing and communication abstractions, infrastructures and applications for AI. Special attention will be devoted to contributions tackling the theme of sustainable AI and resulting from academia-industry collaborations.
The deadline for paper submission is June 15th, 2023.
More information at the link below.
About ECML-PKDD 2023
ECML PKDD is the flagship European machine learning and data mining conference, attracting a worldwide audience. The conference program includes presentations of peer-reviewed novel research, invited talks by leaders in the field, a wide program of workshops and tutorials, poster sessions, a discovery challenge, a demo track and an Applied Data Science track.
ECML PKDD 2023 builds on over 20 years of successful events and conferences hosted around Europe. The conference will attract an audience of over 1000 attendees and will be a unique opportunity for companies to develop connections in both machine learning and data mining communities, acquire new talents, contribute to innovation and market their brands.
ECML PKDD 2023 will be held in Turin, Italy, from September 18 to September 22, 2023. It is organized by Centai (Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Politecnico di Torino.
25 May 2023
Soft robotics involve systems composed primarily of materials with mechanical properties comparable to those of living tissues, for example, easily deformable matter such as elastomers and gels. For that reason, soft robotics control is an interdisciplinary field, spanning material science, biology, continuum mechanics, and, of course, robotics. Navigating this landscape can be daunting: each discipline comes with unique literature, hypotheses, notations, and terminology, adding to the complexity. Furthermore, the field requires consensus on dynamic equations that model soft robots, an active research topic itself.
Soft robots are subjected to an elastic potential field and stabilising dissipation forces while being inherently underactuated and highly nonlinear systems. The task of the control engineer involves harnessing these properties to generate precise motions with limited actuation sources, execute controlled interactions, or store energy during dynamic movements.
In their paper published in the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, EMERGE partner Cosimo Della Santina, from the Delft University of Technology (NL), and collaborators aim to streamline the domain of soft robotics for control theory researchers.
The group introduces soft robotics control via a model-based lens, starting with a unified formulation of soft robot dynamics. It then addresses the challenges of shape control, tracking, underactuation, environmental interactions, actuator dynamics, task space control, and data incorporation in a model-based context. The article also reviews pertinent literature and presents novel results leveraging techniques for rigid robot control.
Source: C. Della Santina, C. Duriez and D. Rus, "Model-Based Control of Soft Robots: A Survey of the State of the Art and Open Challenges," in IEEE Control Systems Magazine, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 30-65, June 2023, DOI: 10.1109/MCS.2023.3253419.
Access EMERGE publications in the link below.
24 May 2023
EMERGE partners from UNIPI are organizing a workshop entitled "Deep Learning meets Neuromorphic Hardware" during the next European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD 2023), to be held in Turin, Italy, on September 18th, 2023.
The goal of this interdisciplinary workshop is to bring together researchers from different fields such as computer science, engineering, physics, Materials Science, Control Theory, and Dynamical Systems to share and discuss exciting ideas at the intersection of deep learning and neuromorphic computing.
The deadline for paper submission is June 12th, 2023.
More information at the link below.
About ECML-PKDD 2023
ECML PKDD is the flagship European machine learning and data mining conference, attracting a worldwide audience. The conference program includes presentations of peer-reviewed novel research, invited talks by leaders in the field, a wide program of workshops and tutorials, poster sessions, a discovery challenge, a demo track and an Applied Data Science track.
ECML PKDD 2023 builds on over 20 years of successful events and conferences hosted around Europe. The conference will attract an audience of over 1000 attendees and will be a unique opportunity for companies to develop connections in both machine learning and data mining communities, acquire new talents, contribute to innovation and market their brands.
ECML PKDD 2023 will be held in Turin, Italy, from September 18 to September 22, 2023. It is organized by Centai (Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Politecnico di Torino.
15 May 2023
Soft grippers, continuum medical robots, soft robotic arms, and other soft robots are designed to be flexible and compliant, allowing them to interact safely with humans and adapt to their environment.
In their paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2023), EMERGE partners from the Delft University of Technology (NL) and collaborators discuss recent research progress for a new type of soft robot called Handed Shearing Auxetics (HSAs) that can rapidly change shape while remaining flexible.
HSAs are a type of actuator that can directly transform applied motor torques into complex motion primitives such as elongation, bending, and twisting, allowing for rapid actuation while preserving structural compliance making them well-suited for applications where safe interaction with humans is important.
The researchers have come up with two new ways to better understand and model these robots. The first is a way to simulate the behaviour of the material in a computer program, which they have implemented as a plugin for the Elastica simulation software. The second is a way to describe the shape of the robot using fewer variables, which they call Selective Piecewise Constant Strain (SPCS) kinematic parameterisation. Both of these ideas were tested and found to be accurate. The simulator was used to replicate experimental data, and motion capture markers were attached to a parallel HSA robot to verify the accuracy of the proposed kinematic shape model. In the future, this research could help improve the control and performance of HSA robots, making them even more useful in the soft robotics field.
Source: M. Stölzle, L. Chin, R. L. Truby, D. Rus and C. D. Santina, "Modelling Handed Shearing Auxetics: Selective Piecewise Constant Strain Kinematics and Dynamic Simulation," 2023 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), Singapore, Singapore, 2023, pp. 1-8, DOI: 10.1109/RoboSoft55895.2023.10121989.
Access EMERGE publications in the link below.
18 March 2023
![[In the Media] BFMTV: AI, quantum and synthetic biology under development at Da Vinci Labs](https://eic-emerge.eu/uploads/bfmtv.png)
Project partner Xavier Aubry, from Da Vinci Labs, presents the EMERGE Project in the French TV channel BFMTV.
Click below to watch the interview (in French).
View Video30 January 2023
EMERGE Consortium secures grant awarded by European Innovation Council for the investigation of a new framework for AI collective awareness
Project scored first among those selected by the EIC’s Pathfinder “Awareness inside” Challenge and will receive a combined €2.8M grant from the European Commission
over the next 4 years.
Pisa, January 30th - How do robots in a collective know what the group as a whole is doing? How can connected devices make sense of the world around them with so many interconnections? How can a robotic arm composed of many independent parts understand how its body behaves as it reaches for an object?
When intelligence is distributed across many parts, be they robots, devices, or objects, it can be tricky for the bigger picture to emerge. Yet answering these questions is key to making collective systems easy to design, monitor and control. This is the goal of the EMERGE consortium composed of the University of Pisa (IT), Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (DE), Delft University of Technology (NL), University of Bristol (UK), and Da Vinci Labs (FR).
The EMERGE project will deliver a new philosophical, mathematical, and technological framework to demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, how collaborative awareness – a representation of shared existence, environment and goals – can arise from the perceptions and interactions of individual agents, without leveraging a pre-existing common language between them.
This collaborative awareness envisioned by EMERGE will transform robotic systems, as well as all kinds of applications which involve providing a service over a loosely coupled collective of entities, both physical or virtual, such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, smart services, biomedical nanodevices, and many others.
EMERGE has been awarded a highly competitive grant in the Horizon Europe funding programme. The project scored first among the 8 projects selected out of 34 proposals submitted to the “Awareness inside” EIC Pathfinder Challenges 2021 call. The partners will receive a combined €2.8M grant from the European Commission over the next 4 years. UK participants in EMERGE are supported by UK Research and Innovation.
EMERGENT AWARENESS
Humans and other biological agents can effectively move in new environments, navigate previously unseen situations, and intuitively coordinate through complex social interactions.
From the moment they enter a room, two people charged with moving a table have at their disposal, through their senses, an abundance of information. They are aware of their own body, their surroundings, as well as of each other and the table. And, as soon as they are aware of their goal, with little to no explicit communication, they can integrate all this data – these individual, or local, awareness states – and cooperate to solve the problem and move the table to a new place.
Artificial intelligence nowadays enables the translation of isolated local awareness states from biological to artificial agents using information about the environment which can be collected from mechanical (contact, vibration, collision, etc.), and electromagnetic (radio, infrared, visible light, etc.) stimuli.
However, the cooperation among those units is often dependent on some kind of central processing unit which collects that information and establishes a centralised awareness which distributes commands to each unit. Although useful, this process allows for very specific and previously programmed situations to be navigated and problems to be solved.
For artificial agents to be able to act in the unstructured conditions that the real-world demands, a new concept of collaborative awareness is needed. EMERGE’s goal is to establish, analyse, implement and test a new artificial intelligence framework that allows this collaborative awareness to emerge from the interplay of multiple individual units of local awareness. This collaborative awareness becomes an emergent process supporting complex, distributed, and loosely coupled systems capable of a high degree of collaboration, self-regulation, and interoperability without predefined protocols.
EMERGENT INNOVATION
EMERGE will implement a clear research-to-technology pathway to surpass limitations and barriers of the current state-of-the-art multi-agent collaborative systems, with potential to produce breakthroughs and open new markets in the next generation of robotic systems.
For that, the Consortium will focus on three use cases. The first use case is modular soft robots – self‐assembling, repairing or replicating robots made from soft materials which offer high freedom of movement, even in confined spaces, and better manipulation of delicate objects. In these robots, the body formed by a physically distributed collective needs to self-organise to account for the dynamic addition of components. The second use-case is robotic swarms – groups with a large number of robots whose behaviour arises from the interactions between themselves and with their environment. This is an example of a large-scale minimal collective where agents need coordination to achieve a collaborative goal. Finally, the third use case is collaborative robots, or cobots – robots interacting in direct contact with, or in close proximity to, humans. These represent a closer-to-market use case where interoperability is currently a significant barrier.
While robotics provides the perfect testing ground for this new framework, EMERGE also envisions impact in areas such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart cities and transportation, microservice-based information and communications technology (ICT) systems, and biomedical nanodevices, among others.
ABOUT THE PARTNERS
University of Pisa
University of Pisa is one of the most renowned educational institutions in Italy, with twenty departments and high level research centers in agriculture, physics, computer science, engineering, medicine and veterinary medicine. Famous alumni of the university include Galileo Galilei, the founder of modern science, the Nobel prize winners Enrico Fermi and Carlo Rubbia, and holders of the Fields Medal for Mathematics, Enrico Bombieri and Alessio Figalli.
Contact Details
Davide Bacciu, Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department and lead of the Pervasive Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
davide.bacciu@di.unipi.it
www.unipi.it
Delft University of Technology
Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (TU Delft) is a modern university with a rich tradition. Its eight faculties and over 30 English-language Master programmes are at the forefront of technological development, contributing to scientific advancement in the interests of society. Ranked among the top universities of technology in Europe TU Delft’s excellent research and education standards are backed by outstanding facilities, research institutes and research schools.
Contact Details
Cosimo Della Santina, Assistant Professor at Cognitive Robotics (CoR)
c.dellasantina@tudelft.nl
www.tudelft.nl
University of Bristol
University of Bristol is internationally renowned due to its outstanding teaching and research, its superb facilities and highly talented students and staff. We are dedicated to academic achievement at the highest levels across a broad range of disciplines, supporting both individual scholarship and interdisciplinary research.
Contact Details
Sabine Hauert, Associate Professor of Swarm Engineering
sabine.hauert@bristol.ac.uk
www.bristol.ac.uk
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich is one of the most renowned universities in Europe. Almost 50,000 students, 14 percent of them from abroad, currently take advantage of the broad range of subjects with 150 offerings from the humanities and cultural studies to law, economics and social sciences, medicine and the natural sciences.
Contact Details
Prof. Dr. Ophelia Deroy, Chair and Head of Philosophy of Mind/CVBE
ophelia.deroy@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
www.lmu.de
Da Vinci Labs
Da Vinci Labs is a research and incubation structure inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. Its interdisciplinary and humanistic approach aims to respond in a competitive way to the ecological challenges of tomorrow, and to bring out the future champions of deeptech, in particular in the field of quantum technologies, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. To do this, Da Vinci Labs participates in European collaborative research projects and builds a technological infrastructure in Touraine which will be made available to researchers and entrepreneurs ready to tackle our major societal challenges.
Contact Details
Xavier Aubry, Managing Director
contact@davincilabs.eu
www.davincilabs.eu
30 November 2022
Soft robots are made of materials similar to living tissues, such as elastomers and gels, which allow them to deform their bodies, adapt to their environment, and manipulate objects. For that reason soft robotics is a rapidly growing field with a wide range of applications, including food and beverage processing, laparoscopic surgery, prosthetics, disaster relief, and even space exploration. At the same time, they are more complex to model, control, and sense than rigid robots.
Sensing the shape of soft robots is an especially intricate task. Sensors must not obstruct the natural behaviour and movement of the robots or reduce their natural softness. At the same time, non-collocated and nonlinear sensors require algorithms for the measurements to be interpreted and connected to a description of the robot's shape. As such it requires innovative technological and algorithmic solutions
In their paper published in the journal Soft Matter, EMERGE partners from the Delft University of Technology (NL) and collaborators propose a new method for sensing the shape of soft robots: using magnetic sensors which are compact, sensitive, and can be easily embedded into soft robots.
The researchers also developed a neural network-based architecture that learns to estimate the robot’s 3D shape from the sensor readings and incorporates prior knowledge of the robot’s deformation modes. The approach allows for the rearrangement and removal of redundant sensors without requiring retraining of the neural network. The method was validated through simulations and experiments, achieving a mean relative error of 4.5%.
Source: T. Baaij, M. Holkenborg, M. Stölzle, D. van der Tuin, J. Naaktgeboren, R. Babuška, and C. Della Santina, “Learning 3D shape proprioception for continuum soft robots with multiple magnetic sensors,” Soft Matter, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 44–56, 2023, DOI: 10.1039/D2SM00914E.
Access EMERGE publications in the link below.
04 November 2022
![[In the Media] Il Sole 24 Ore: University of Pisa, start of European project for Artificial Intelligence](https://eic-emerge.eu/uploads/EMERGE_website_thumb2.jpg)
The start of the EMERGE Project was highlighted by the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.
"The Emerge project intends to explore the concept of emergent consciousness and its role in facilitating collaboration in collectives of intelligent but individually very simple agents," explains Bacciu. "In today's multi-agent artificial systems, complex cooperative behaviour is achieved at the expense of the heterogeneity of the collective's components. Emerge aims to extend to artificial agents the ability, typical of living organisms, to possess both self-consciousness and the awareness of belonging to a collaborative collective, without the former necessarily dissolving into the latter. The ultimate goal of the project is to make possible the development of complex, distributed and flexible systems, capable of exhibiting collaborative behaviour, self-regulating and characterised by 'natural' interoperability, i.e. in the absence of predefined communication protocols."
Read more below (in Italian).
03 November 2022
The EMERGE project's kickoff meeting took place on November 3rd in Pisa, Italy. It was a pleasure to meet all the partners and we are excited to start this adventure in artificial intelligence and robotics!
MERGE brings together a unique blend of expertise on philosophy of mind, ethics, and neuroscience (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany); neural nonlinear dynamical systems, lifelong learning, distributed, and edge-AI (University of Pisa, Italy); nonlinear dynamical systems and control, computational neuroscience, soft and collaborative robotics (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands); collective awareness and intelligence, swarm robotics and minimal collectives (University of Bristol, United Kingdom); as well as innovation, exploitation, and communication of AI and robotics research (Da Vinci Labs, France).
