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RoboCom is a proposal for a Preparatory Action for a new FET Flagship, responding to a call from the European Commission

Future societal, scientific and technological challenges are tremendously complex, laying among the boundaries of several disciplines and cutting-edge knowledge. FET Flagships are science- and technology-driven, large-scale, multidisciplinary research initiatives built around a visionary unifying goal. They tackle grand science and technology (S&T) challenges requiring cooperation among a range of disciplines, communities and programmes. FET Flagships should provide a strong and broad basis for future innovation and economic exploitation, as well as novel benefits for society of a potential high impact. The overarching nature and magnitude implies that they can only be realised through a collaborative, long-term sustained cooperation effort. They will provide a long-term sustained collaborative effort among European institutions to create a strong and broad basis for the economical exploitation of the research, and the eventual advancement of scientific knowledge.

The European Commission launched a call for Coordination and Support Actions (CSA) to prepare new FET Flagship proposals. The CSA should describe the potential of the federate effort of scientists toward innovative concepts, and how this will mature into a more detailed plan over the preparatory action.

RoboCom is gathering experts in several domains to prepare a new FET Flagships proposal which will shape the robots of the future.

In the rapid progress and wide spreading of robotics, Europe is playing a leading role and is in a forefront position for its competitiveness at both industrial and scientific level. Together with the impressive technological advances in ICT and AI, robotics is today bringing an impact on economy and Society, by enabling the materialization of machines intended to perform tasks in the service of human beings, in many aspects of our lives.

Robot abilities have progressed in terms of the complexity and the precision of movements, as well as the accuracy of motion control and the level of intelligence, and such a progression of abilities is the ultimate goal in robotics. The quest for robot abilities has still important opportunities for progress. This is enabled by recent progresses in soft robotics, modern paradigms of embodied intelligence, the advances of deep learning and AI, new cloud-based approaches to cognitive functions, the progress of neuroscience-based robotics, the many new materials, and other emergent scientific paradigms. Further robot abilities would enable their application in our environments, on the humans’ side. On the other hand, reaching further abilities presents new scientific and technological challenges, requiring interdisciplinary knowledge and research for proving new principles and for developing new solutions, and for ultimately transforming new science in new technology.

In the RoboCom multidisciplinary approach, biology is the inspiration for simplifying principles to deal with a complex world, materials science is the foundation for giving the body its proper role in shaping behaviour, AI is the way to develop new forms of cognitive functions, ICT keeps all this in a connected world, and humanities are the way to advance the knowledge on the relation between humans and robots and to steer the impact of new machines on the Society.

Join us in shaping the robots of the future, and together we will tackle an unprecedented S&T endeavour, to bridge science and sustainable welfare and to capitalize on the synergy resulting from the convergence of science and engineering.